Perusing the bays at media day for the 2017 SHOT Show, Nick and I kept remarking to ourselves that we couldn’t find anything new, fun, exciting, or scintillating. The surefire cure for this sort of thing is to look for a logo you’ve never seen and dive right in. Enter EMF and the Pietta Kronos.
EMF is an importer of all things odd, specifically replica revolvers for cowboy action shooting as well as blank firing pistols. Of more interest to me was their Kronos semiautomatic rifle chambered in .30-06 imported from Pietta.
Featuring crisp fiber optic dovetail sights and an absurdly short barrel, the Kronos would seem to be happiest in brushy country where a fast pointing, fast reloading, hard hitting rifle is the order of the day.
Fed off a box magazine, and sporting fairly ergonomic controls for dropping the bolt and getting the safety from on to off, it’s actually a fairly nimble, pointable little rifle. Recoil is not as bad as I was expecting, owing in some part to the slowly cycling action.
The walnut isn’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen, but it’s good enough to say “classic” and that’s about it. Now for the bad news.
The trigger is the biggest pile of mush I’ve ever pulled my way through. Though it was quite light, it was more akin to a light double action revolver trigger with what seemed like half an inch of travel before the break. More worrying was that in the four rounds I fired, one failed to chamber with the bolt denting the case body in such a way that I judged it unsafe for firing.
Beyond the MSRP of $999, details are sketchy. I’ve shared my contact info with the only person at the booth who gave me a card and I hope we’ll be kept in the loop on this fun little rifle.
Not exactly new, looks a lot like the Reming ton Woodmaster. Fix the trig ger, chamber it in .308, make 20 round magazines available and drop the price $200 and I’m interested.
Indeed, chambered in .308 and accepting m1a magazines this has possibilities. One wonders why, with a mass proliferation of good trigger designs, so many arms are brought to market with such poor ones. It’s as if the things are meant to be admired without being shot.
Nice to see something that isn’t dripping with tacticool AR’ness. One of my favorite rifles is my HK SLB 2000. It is similar in look and design to this one. I love my ARs and AKs but after a while, the tactical stuff gets boring and commercial hunting rifles look like fun. Not everything has to be about self defense and fighting off the horde.
I hope we have a return of classy hunting guns.
So once you get past the 25% failure rate and a $#itty trigger, this $1K rifle is good to go.
Not exactly sure why you find the Kronos details “sketchy” since this identical rifle was campaigned by EMF at the 2016 Shot Show as well, which tells me that if one year later the company can’t come up with a reliable demo for Shot Show, no one in their right mind would want to buy one of these klunkers even if the MSRP was $299.
You don’t have to report on EVERY item you see…..
I see a copy of the Remington woodsmaster. Magazine spring issues and all.
Let’s drop that price and hope they figured out the issues with self destructing recievers….
Looks just like my BAR. Same price point and it’s a Browning. That name still has some cache.
Yup, looks like a BAR, I have an FNAR (Tacticool BAR) in .308 and love it! Hundreds of rounds through it from Wolf steel case to Hornady ELDx with nary a hiccup. Shoots Wolf into 2MOA and good 150gr into sub MOA. Doesn’t like longer bullets so much as it only has 1:12 twist and has a nice trigger. I got mine for about $900. I named it Ragnar.
Looks remarkably similar to a Merkel (S1 maybe? can’t remember) I used to own, all the way down to the sights. That was the most naturally pointing rifle I’ve ever had.
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