Just thought I'd show what I did with my Akela.
Bit of background ... I have a ranch in central Virginia with the typical mix of poultry (chickens, turkeys, guineas, ducks, geese, etc). So in my barn I have bags of feed for them. The nice sheltered conditions in the barn and the feed together ... brings rats. Even if you put the feed in metal cans, you still get rats using it as a place to live, where they like chewing wires on the equipment and other things. They have to be dealt with, and a hot, fast shooting PCP rifle like the Akela is just the tool.
So I bought an Akela .22 PCP to deal with them. If I went with a firearm like a .22LR pistol/rifle, I'd be punching holes in the barn walls and roof, which is not good. With the .22 pellet, it's fast and lethal, but the half the grain weight of a .22LR means no wall/roof thru-n-thru shots. But oh wow do they stop a rat!!
Using the Akela I found the crisscross of wood behind the pistol grip to be in the way. Silly, but often when grabbing to raise it while keeping my eye on a moving rat, I was often grabbing the crisscross and not the pistol grip. The wood crisscross is not needed structurally, and without it if you sling the rifle muzzle down, your shoulder now fits nicely into that open spot since they put the sling mount right in front of it. I found it cleaner and easier to use without it.
Oh and after removing the crisscross and now sanding, I also sanded down the sharp edges in the stock, giving it a more rounded look. Not for everybody, but again it's the fit I liked. I was going to re-stain it, but once you get into this wood, you find this Turkish walnut is NOT north american walnut. It's nice for what its mounted on, but it's nothing to protect and display. So I went all-black. Just my pref...
I tried various optics, but the fast shooting on moving rats in the low-lite barn was better suited for a HALO sight. Big field of view and you can engage with both eyes open. I went with the Holosun 510C HALO (about $300US) and it's great. It has the "motion-detection on/off" feature, so you're not manually turning it on and off. I run it with only the center "finite" red dot, not the dot and circle as most guys do when running a HALO on an AR. The finite dot makes precision rat head shots easy.
In my barn I sit at one end in the evening. That's when the rats get active. I sit behind some boxes with a two very low wattage spot lights (about 15W each) in front of me pointed away at different angles. It gives some light inside the barn and makes it hard for them to see me behind them. I found that anything brighter spooked the rats and fewer would come out. I turn down the brightness on the HALO's red dot to compensate for the low-light conditions and let my eyes adjust, then start watching the rafters. The rats are a challenge! They hardly EVER stop and give me a nice stationary shot. When on the rafters, they stay on the move. To include regular hops to other rafters.
A key thing with this Akela rifle that you have to keep in mind though, is the height of your optic. On a normal hunting rifle the optic's rectical is about 1.5" above the bore. The Akela with it's raised rail and then height of the HALO sight itself, the height of the rectical over the bore is over 2.5". So when making barn-range shots (10-50 feet), the convergence of the bore's line with the visual red dot sight line is intense, and actually opposite what you may be used to if you're a normal outdoor rifle shooter where on distance shots you're compensating for bullet drop. Here, at these ranges there is no appreciable bullet (pellet) drop to worry about, but that convergence of 2.5" bore and sight lines are a dramatic factor. Especially when you want to put the pellet into a 1/2" rat-head kill zone anywhere in the 10-50' barn-rat range!!
I first sighted it at 50', the length of the barn, but found I had to hold the red dot a full 2" below the rat if they were running a rafter only 10-15' away. Wow, that's a lot when it's a moving target and you want to put the pellet in that 1/2" rat-head kill zone.
So what I found for barn-rat shooting using this setup was to sight the HALO in at 25', then if I have a rat in closer (say 10-15'), I hold the red dot 1" high, since the bore line hasn't come up yet to converge/cross the sight line yet. If you don't, it's a full miss on that small rat-head kill zone.
Out past 25', I have to hold under. That's right ... "under". Not "over" as if you're out shooting a rifle at distance and compensating for bullet drop. Here you're still compensating for that high optic's visual line covergence with the bore line. And it's intense for such a high sight and such a small 1/2" rat kill zone. At 40-45' out, I'm holding a full 1" under the rat.
Anyways, hate to bore you folks with all that, but before I went into rat killing here at the ranch, I was a normal rifle distance shooter and always thinking "hold over" if past your sight in range, due to bullet drop. But here I had to ignore all those decades of training and do the opposite ... hold "under" when in the barn and shooting past my sight in 25' point. It's just different. And my sighting at 25' and then holding the 1' over or under before and past it, I found it much simpler than sighting it in at a longer range and then dealing with what could be over 2" hold over before the sight in point. It just hurt my head less.... Since I never use this outside with normal long rifle shots, sighting at 25' was perfect (for me).
Anyways, this rifle shoots fast, flat, and accurate. I can't say that enough. With these mods and the HALO sight using it's single "finite" center dot, it's an awesome barn/rat rifle. And that's with the rats crossing the rafters at a hussle, with their unpredictable "quarter second" stops/pauses, and with their frequent hops from one rafter to the next. It's a challenge. This rifle is great for it. (Fun as heck too!)
Are there others that have modified their Akela? If so, I'd love to see what you did.
