For a long time, the thought of a clamp-on muzzle brake made me cringe. When I got my Winchester M70 in 300 Win Mag I wanted to get a muzzle brake for it but the barrel was not threaded. I decided to just shoot it as is. Fast forward to this year and my desire to put a muzzle brake on it finally lead to me giving in. I figured I'd get the barrel threaded and just buy a brake for it. I did some reading on clamp on brakes and wasn't really expecting to get one, but I did read some really good things about Witt Machine so I decided to take a plunge.
Their clamp-on muzzle brakes are made to order and you have to supply barrel specs to them. They take two measurements: diameter at the muzzle and diameter 1 1/2 inches from the muzzle measured in thousandths of an inch. You also give them the caliber and your preferred finish (stainless, graphite, or FDE). They then machine the brake for you and off it goes. From when I placed my order to shipping I believe it was two days so they make the brake then get them out pretty quickly.
The gun I have this break on is a stainless steel Winchester M70 Ultimate Shadow. It has a 26" barrel and a Vortex Viper HST 6-24x50.
BUILD QUALITY
The build quality on the brake is excellent. It is machined very well and feels very sturdy. The stainless finish on mine is very, very nice. It honestly looks and feels nicer than a lot of muzzle brakes I've used. The brake is held on by 4 allen screws. The brake has 5 ports on each side and a bunch of smaller holes on the top to vent gas. Since the specs are tight I got the brake slid on about halfway then I had to use a rubber mallet to smack it down the rest of the way. It wasn't any trouble getting it on and once it was all the way on it felt very secure before I tightened the allen screws. For the threads I used red loctite. I'm sure you can use blue, but since it's a 300 WM I decided to use red for a little extra peace of mine.
RECOIL
I don't have too much to say about recoil except this: the brake made my 300 Win Mag go from a shoulder bruiser to a recoil impulse about on par with an unbraked 243 Winchester.
ACCURACY
Usually with muzzle brakes you hear different things like they affect accuracy a little bit or some people will say they have no effect at all. Oddly, it seemed like this brake actually improved the accuracy on my rifle. I shoot almost exclusively Hornady American Whitetail through my M70. Usually it shoots around 1 MOA with the occasional sub-MOA group. Pretty damn good already for a hunting rifle. I went to sight it in with the brake on and shot 3 separate 3 shot groups. The groups were .5 MOA, .8 MOA, and .6 MOA respectively. The brake didn't really change POI at all and the groups seemed to be better than what I normally shoot. Obviously this is a small sample size and perhaps I was just really on today, but still that's pretty damn good and at the least you can say the brake had no negative affect on accuracy. I should mention, these groups were at a little over 100 yards (probably around 120).
Overall I would tell anyone not to hesitate to buy one of these brakes. The build quality is great, the recoil impulse makes the gun feel like a feather is bumping you, and the accuracy is at least not affected in any way by the brake.
10/10 would recommend.
Website: http://wittmachine.net/index.php?mai...roducts_id=180