Faxon Firearms M&P Slides At NRAAM 2018

At the 2018 NRA Annual Meetings, Faxon Firearms released its Patriot and Hellfire slides for M&P pistols.

Faxon is manufacturing the slides entirely in-house from bar stock giving them the ability to do pretty much whatever they want to do with the slide rather than being forced to color within the lines. In addition to slide profiles unlike any other M&P slide on the market, they have also added two different optics cuts to choose from that are compatible with either an RMR footprint or Vortex Venom, Viper, or Burris Fast Fire red dots.

The most eye-catching of the show guns was this chameleon coated RMR cut slide with a Holosun HS507C mounted and a chameleon finish Faxon barrel. While it might not be everyone's cup of tea, we can all agree that it is not only striking but also pretty dang unique.  When asked, Faxon didn't indicate plans to put the rainbow slide into production.

Faxon introduced its Glock barrels at last year's NRAAM in Atlanta and has been quickly expanding the line to include other models like the M&P barrels seen on these show guns.

We also got a chance to handle the Patriot slides with the Vortex optic cut and found the serrations to be pretty dang good. Good, effective slide serrations are a balance of having deep enough valleys for organic material to be smashed into and sharp, narrow ridges that provide a positive gripping surface.

The flexibility to choose any number of optics that share the Vortex/Burris footprint or even opt for the more traditional RMR cut is a big step for aftermarket slides. All too often they are built for only the RMR or force the end user to utilize substandard mounting solutions like MOS plates.

If you are the kind of shooter that likes to show a little barrel, the Hellfire slide has some nice windows milled into it that put your barrel on display and let some of that fancy barrel shine through the understated DLC coating Faxon applies to the Hellfire.

The Patriot is much more traditional in the sense that it lacks those windows and provides far more gripping area on the slide.

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