Hi guys. This is Chuck from Presscheck training & consulting.

Let's talk a little bit about sling setup. Specifically, you know, having the sling sized appropriately for you. We've got a bunch of different sling styles out here.

Primarily, we're talking about two point either closed loop designs or open tail design slings right now, when, when you are setting this thing up, don't just, you know, route it around, whatever your attachment method is, and hook it in and throw it over your body, more often than not, based on your body size or whether or not you want to primarily use this thing in kit or out of kit, you're going to need to use the friction adapters to take out some extra sling material on one end or the other.

One of the big things that I see when I'm in classes is that people will try to adjust their sling tension, their permanent sling tension, not their adjustable sling tension. They will try to size their sling permanently by bringing the friction adapter that is up front too far to the rear. Remember, on an adjustable sling design, whether it is a closed or open loop, when the adjustment adapter goes all the way forward and hits the friction adapter, you're done. You can't get it any tighter than that, you're now hardware on hardware contact.

So if I had this friction adapter milked further back, let's say to here, I've just given up six inches of adjustment, and I now have six inches of less travel until my hardware, in this case, on the Blue Force gear open tail GMT till it crashes into that other piece of hardware there. So if I the sling was too big for me because I was a person of smaller stature, or whatever, and I wanted the overall sling design to be smaller, a better bet is going to be to take out that extra material from here and allow these buckles to go back.

And what we do is we have a tendency to want these buckles to be here because we don't want those on our neck. We don't want those on our back because we think they're going to push in or create a hot spot or or something like that. And I would submit to you that having the range of adjustment on my duty sling, to me, is more important than whether or not these two friction adapters fall somewhere in between my shoulder blades, on the back of the on the bat, on the back of my gear, or whatever. So given my druthers, I'm always going to adjust the sling from the rear when taken out permanent, permanent tension.

I want to have this friction adapter as close as possible to my connection point here Next, let's talk about overall adjustability and how that affects carrying ride on the gun, as well as the ability to use supported positions. So if you want to use this sling for some type of wrap or supported position or control the rifle a little bit better. When you're running around, you're going to want that sling further forward.

The problem with running your sling further out, having your attachment point closer to the end of your rail, is that your sling has to remain looser overall in order for you to be able to shoot off the hard side. When you start tightening up the sling too much, the sling starts to bind you as you're driving your gun over to your hard side. With me as a righty, that means I go to the right.

The reason why it's called the hard side because it's hard to shoot from that direction as a right handed fire I can turn and put the gun literally 180 degrees behind me. But when bringing the gun to the right, I'm lucky if I can get out to 90 degrees. So I have literally twice the range of ability to break the rifle down because of the cross body nature and the fact that the guns are my right shoulder. So when I'm shooting shots off to the right while my direction of travel is this direction that's referred to as shooting off the hard side. And shooting off the hard side is much more difficult when your sling is over tight. It's too tight. So if I have my sling loose enough to where I feel no binding whatsoever, now I could drive the gun to the hard side very easily.

The problem is, when I release the rifle, the rifle sits down too low. This rifle is sitting down around in my sternum. Ideally, I want my rifle to be up in the pocket of my shoulder, not so it's closer, in case I have to shoot fast or some tactical Timmy reason. It has to deal with the fact that this is a 14 and a half inch carbine, in this case with a suppressor on it. If you look at these shingles on a magazine, when the rifle sits across body, the magazines act as a fulcrum. If the gun goes down too far, the magazines actually push the gun. Back into the shooter. So in this case, the hot suppressor is being forced towards my legs, increasing the chance that I'm going to burn my Gore Tex, burn my cry pants, burn myself, destroy equipment and kick the gun or get hit in the knees or the shin with the gun, if I've dumped the rifle and had to transition to a pistol, if I have the gun tensioned a little bit higher, now the fulcrum acts in my favor, and it pushes the suppressor out away from the body, so that I can potentially walk and even pick my legs up to, like, climb stairs if I've had to transition to my handgun and I haven't been able to sweep or dump the gun out of the way, and it's still being held centerline on my body using only the sling.

So the sling tension and the sling location matter. So in order to have my cake and eat it too, if I want to have this gun high up in my shoulder, but not bind me. When I go over to the hard side, I can elect to place the sling further back on the weapon. Now this allows me to get on the gun and have it nice and tight and drive the gun to the hard side without any binding whatsoever, also keeping the rifle up in the pocket of my shoulder, directing the front of the gun out away from my body. When I'm wearing armor and or plates, what I lose is the ability to get an extra wrap on the gun when using sewing supported positions, such as NRA, kneeling, sitting, or prone, unsupported, where I don't have the terrain where I can get the magazine down on the deck, and I'm having to support the rifle up front, using sling tension to avoid having to use muscle tension on the rifle. So this is why I chose to have two sling swivel locations on the gun.

This is my default carry configuration if I need to take a precision shot. And the only additional stability that I have available to me is that provided by the sling I can always move it to its front sling swivel location. In this case, there's a sling swivel socket put on the back of the press check barricade stop, which is located here on the M lock rail. So just a little bit of my thoughts on sling setup, adjust permanent tension out from the rear, not from the front. Keep your friction hardware forward to give you your greater strange of adjustment with either a closed or an open loop design. I don't care if you use a closed, enclosed system or an open tailed system, just make sure that it can be as wide as you need it to get over environmental clothing and armor, and it can get as tight as you need it, so that you can shoot from a very tight slung up supported position in sitting or in kneeling, when you're not wearing any kit at all. And once you get that sorted out, once you've got that sling exactly where you need it, where you can go from one extreme to the other without having to adjust the friction adapters. You have a properly adjusted sling for your rifle and your use case. Anyway, guys, that's Chuck from press. Check if you guys are interested in getting either the GMT, this is the one inch variant, or the closed loop sling systems designed by Blue Force gear. Head on over to BlueForceGear.com and check them out.