Colt CBX Tactical Hunter

Solid and Accurate, this American-made Bolt-Action from the makers of the M16 deserves a closer look from Sportsmen.

Story and Photos by Frank Jardim

OUTSIDE of the M16 rifle, most contemporary shooters don’t associate Colt with long guns. That’s probably because they only dallied in the civilian rifle market in the late 1800s with the Burgess and
Lightning repeaters. They had plenty of military contracts before and after, from Civil War rifled muskets to .50-caliber machine guns, but unless you were a military gun buff or in the armed forces, chances are you only thought of Colt for handguns. That changed in the 1960s with Colt’s military M16 series of rifles, but by the time the semiautomatic models took off with civilians shooters, Colt had many competitors crowding the marketplace.

Now Colt is making rifles for the civilian market again with a fine bolt action that doesn’t seem to me to be getting the attention it deserves. I suspect this is because the shooting public still doesn’t connect the Colt name with civilian long guns. Let me present for your consideration the Colt CBX bolt-action family. It consists of two models, the CBX Precision Rifle and the CBX Tac Hunter, offered in two calibers: the versatile .308 Winchester and 6.5 Creedmoor. MSRP is $1,999 and $999, respectively. In a survey of actual online retail prices, I’ve found them as low as $1,600 for the Precision and $870 for the Tac Hunter. They
share a common CZ 600-based action. The Tac Hunter is the lighter-barreled hunting version of the long-range precision rifle. I tested a CBX Tac Hunter in .308 Winchester for this story.

INFLUENCED BY THE CZ 600 series rifles, the CBX series uses a separate six-lug bolt head attached to a bolt body of larger overall diameter than the lugs themselves. It operates with exceptional smoothness with no trace of binding in the receiver. The locking lugs are arranged in three, front and back, pairs spaced evenly around the bolt face, allowing engagement and disengagement with only 60 degrees of bolt rotation. The cock-on-opening action requires only 6.5 pounds to open. That, along with the smoothness and 60-degree bolt throw, make for quick cycling. If bolts with separate heads make you anxious, know that the base of the bolt handle itself engages a slot in the receiver to serve as an additional safety lug locking the bolt body in the action when closed.

The spring-tensioned extractor built into the right side locking lug engages the cartridge rim as it pushes it off the magazine but shouldn’t be counted on to prevent double feeds. Operate the action with authority and without pause through its full cycle to avoid those. Pausing the bolt stroke before the action was closed seemed to result in the cartridge’s rim slipping from under the extractor claw. Engaging the safety both locks the trigger and locks the bolt closed, the latter feature preventing the accidental brushing open of the bolt while moving through dense foliage. A nice safety feature is a visual cocking indicator in the form of a high-visibility red rectangle at the exposed rear end of the bolt. An ambidextrous thumb-operated safety switch is mounted on the tang. A rectangular button on the right rear of the receiver is depressed to remove the bolt for cleaning.

The excellent, adjustable, single stage trigger was set for 4.25 pounds from the factory, but can be set from 2.5 to 5 pounds. Adjustments require removing the two trigger guard screws and dismounting the barreled action from the stock. This is not a great challenge, but it might be something best done before you go to the range or head off to the hunt. The trigger pull on the test rifle was short and broke crisply with no take-up at all.
Rather than a fixed box magazine, the CBX feeds from a removable polymer five-round-capacity, double-column, single-feed Magpul PMAG-5 7.62 AC magazine. The balance point of the rifle is actually right in front of the magazine so the protruding portion doesn’t interfere with comfortably carrying the CBX. A tactical upside is the rifle can be quickly reloaded. An oversized ambidextrous magazine release designed to be used with the fingertip of your shooting hand without breaking your grip is built into the polymer trigger guard assembly. Magpul also makes a 10-round mag if you’re expecting a fight.

The Tac Hunter has a 20-inch, threaded-muzzle, free-floated, medium profile, four-groove, button-rifled barrel with a 1-in-10-inch twist mounted to a substantial, flat-bottomed, stainless steel receiver intended to increase rigidity and thus accuracy. The receiver’s recoil lug mates solidly with an aluminum chassis molded into the front portion of the stock. The gray polymer CBX Tac Hunter stock is designed for light weight and weather resistance in the field. It has a beavertail forend that gives your supporting hand a substantial swell to hang onto and full pistol grip with plenty of space behind to wrap your thumb around it nice and low, away from your nose during recoil. The gripping surfaces have an excellent nonslip texture molded in. It has two forward sling swivel bases (one for a bipod) and one in the buttstock. It has a thick, soft rubber pad on the butt that I found absorbs .308 recoil to the point of making it comfortable. My favorite features on this well designed stock are the length-of-pull spacers (from 12.75 inches to 14.25 inches) and cheek risers for the comb that allow the shooter to customize the buttstock for a cheek weld that works with their optics. For someone who always struggles with telescopic sights on traditional straight-combed, fixed length-of-pull rifle stocks, the idea of customizing a stock to the shape of my face and my scope’s eye relief was wonderful. When properly set up, the shouldered rifle automatically lines up the eye with the scope ocular at the correct eye relief.

FOR RANGE TESTING, I wanted to mount a Sightmark (sightmark.com) Citadel 3-18×50 scope and use it at the maximum 18x magnification. I had an excellent Riton (ritonoptics.com) two-clamp Picatinny rail mount, but I needed to get a rail section to install on the CBX receiver, which comes pre-drilled and tapped for No. 8-40 screws on the centerline. Colt sells the Picatinny rail section separately. Remington 700-pattern scope mounts and bases will fit the CBX too. I intended to shoot prone at 100 yards from my B&T Industries (accushot.com) Atlas Precision Bipod. This top-of-the-line, battlefield-proven, machined aluminum unit has legs that are quickly and easily adjustable for length and angle and a tensioned pivoting boss for solid support.
However, mine is the BT46 model that mounts to a Picatinny rail with a single, quick-release latch. Fortunately, B&T makes an adapter plate (BT17) that perfectly fit the forend of the CBX using the existing sling mounting studs. Once attached, the rear mounting stud needed a small, hardware-store washer to position it high enough to attach my sling. With an eye toward field emergencies, I’ve been using a Firefield (firefield.com) two-point paracord sling, which is comfortable, adjustable from 37.5 inches to 45 inches, and made from 80 feet of 550-pound-test paracord. (If you can’t get yourself out of trouble with that much paracord and a roll of duct tape, there’s probably no saving you.)

The final shooting accessory I wanted for my range test was my Silencer Central (silencercentral.com) Banish 30 multicaliber suppressor. It’s awkward shooting rifles prone with over-the-ear hearing protection, and shooting any high-powered rifle like that can be rough on the shoulder in short order. I knew the suppressor would reduce the felt recoil as well as lower the report to ear-safe levels. The CBX rifle is guaranteed capable of 1-MOA accuracy and I didn’t want to hold it back by not shooting my best because I was uncomfortable. Curiously, the CBX muzzle was threaded for 9/16×24, but, having discovered this early on in my study of the rifle, I got the necessary thread adapter from Silencer Central.
With a small squeezable sandbag under the rifle butt, I shot a series of five-shot strings with three different, essentially random, ammo types. To my delight, all loads shot well, averaging groups of 1.5 inches overall. That’s not 1 MOA, but it suggests that with the right ammunition, the CBX could easily
shoot 1 MOA. Plain old Winchester white box 7.62x51mm NATO 147-grain FMJ shot average groups of 1.43 inches, which is impressive for what is basically a military standard load. Winchester Match .308 168-grain MatchKing HPBT averaged 1.5 inches. Black Hills Ammunition Gold .308 Match 155-grain Hornady A-Max bullet loads shot groups averaging 1.57 inches.

Recoil was never uncomfortable with the suppressor attached, so I decided to experiment without it and found that the soft rubber pad on the butt plate was doing most of the recoil dampening work. This is not a rifle that will beat up your shoulder lacking a muzzle brake or suppressor. The CBX Tac Hunter is a solid and accurate, CZ 600-inspired but all American-made, high-quality rifle that deserves a close look from American sportsmen. I’m surprised it isn’t priced a lot higher than it is. For more on this and other Colt firearms, visit colt.com.