Video lesson · Rifle build
NRL Hunter rifle setup
What Jon ran at the Snake River Pro/Am, February 2026.
A 6.5 Creedmoor put together for NRL Hunter — modular enough to teach with, configurable enough to travel with, and trimmed to live inside the 16-pound teams cap. Here's every component on this rifle and why it's there.
- Published
- February 13, 2026
- Runtime
- 19:28
- Instructor
- Jon Bumpus
- Level
- Intermediate
The rifle
Built in 2023 or 2024, refined since. Update, October 2026: Jon has since moved his NRL Hunter rifle to a Red Beard Gun Works build on their Mjolnir action. This page is the TL3 rifle he ran at Snake River in February 2026.
Build philosophy
A rifle that has to do three jobs.
Jon's PRS rig is a 25-pound, purpose-built 6 Dasher in a KRG C4. He loves it. He also doesn't carry it up a mountain. This rifle is the other half of the answer — and the way it got designed says a lot about how Jon thinks about rifles in general.
Jon built it to be modular and configurable for three contexts — his primary line of work, the teaching he does at The Cadre, and the NRL Hunter matches he competes in — without rebuilding the platform between them. That means one chassis, one set of ergonomics, one trigger reach. It also has to live inside the 16-pound cap that NRL Hunter Teams and Open Heavy run on, which means every gram of comfort gets paid for somewhere else.
Jon walks it in the video in the order it goes together: the barreled action, then the chassis, glass and can, then the bipod and the load. This page follows the same order.
Build sheet
The whole rifle, at a glance.
If you want to skip the prose and just see what's bolted on, here's the parts list. Each piece gets a deeper read below.
Piece by piece
Every component, explained.
Eight parts, three acts. Each one with the reason it's on the rifle, the tradeoff, and a jump to the spot in the video where he talks about it.
The barreled action
The action is the anchor. Pick it first, because everything else gets built around it. Once the action's set, the barrel is where you buy yourself room to breathe on weight — and weight is the whole conversation on a Hunter gun. Get these two right and the rest of the rifle is a series of smaller arguments.
- Zermatt TL3
- Swappable bolt face
- Integrated recoil lug
- ~$1,100
Zermatt Arms TL3 action
Affordable, reliable, and modular enough to chase different cartridges.
Around $1,100, picked up two or three years ago. Jon wanted an action that was reliable, consistent and repeatable, that accepted prefit barrels, and that let him swap the bolt face to change cartridges and calibers "really, really simply."
It runs smooth. It's been reliable over two years of shooting. The integrated recoil lug means one less thing on the spec sheet to worry about. For an action that isn't built to be a dedicated, single-purpose gun, his verdict on the price: "It wasn't bad at all."
- Proof carbon prefit
- 24" · 1:8 twist
- 6.5 Creedmoor
- ~1,600 rds
Proof Research carbon fiber barrel
24-inch, 1:8 twist, 6.5 Creedmoor — chambered prefit.
Just shy of 1,600 rounds. Same barrel since the build came together — about two years on it now. 24 inches, 1:8 twist, the typical Proof prefit go-to. The carbon sheds weight, so Jon can run some heavier components and still make the 16-pound limit for Teams and Open Heavy.
You'll hear that carbon-wrap barrels walk after five, six, seven rounds on a string. Jon hasn't seen it. He ran this same barrel up at Brian Morgan's Hat Creek last year on higher-round-count strings and shots didn't open up on him. That doesn't mean it can't happen on yours. It means it hasn't happened on his.
Driving it
With the barreled action set, the next four pieces are about how you actually run the rifle — what you hold, what you look through, what's keeping the gun honest, and what's coming off the muzzle. These are the parts that have to cover his day job, his teaching, and his matches. In Jon's words, the rifle goes "from one application to the other with very minimal changes."
- KRG Whiskey-3 Pro
- Folder
- Full-length ARCA
- Toolless adj.
KRG Whiskey-3 Pro chassis
The C4's ergonomics in a configuration light enough to carry up a mountain.
Jon shoots KRG because Phil put him onto them. “I started shooting KRG chassis because Phil highly recommended them.” It was extremely apparent the second he got one in his hands: he loves the ergonomics and the feel. Working with KRG as a company has been “nothing but excellent.”
This rifle started life in a KRG X-Ray and moved into the Whiskey-3 Pro. Jon's reason: ergonomically, it's very similar to the C4 he shoots in PRS, “but it's a lot lighter.” That's what lets him run it in NRL Hunter and in his day job.
Toolless cheek riser, comb height, butt-pad height, length of pull. That matters in two places. One, on the line — when something feels off, he can fix it without breaking out a screwdriver. Two, at a class — he can show a student what an incorrect LOP feels like, or what it feels like when the comb is jammed so high you're slamming your face into the butt pad, without disassembling anything to demo it.
The folder shrinks the airline case. The full-length ARCA on the forend means he drops the rifle on an Anvil 30, or any other ball head, without hunting for a sweet spot. Bipods slide. Nothing has to come unmounted to reconfigure the gun for the next stage.
- KAHLES K328i
- SKMR4+ reticle
- 2026 refined
- Phil's glass
KAHLES K328i — SKMR4+ reticle
The 2026 refined model, borrowed from Phil for this match.
Borrowed from Phil for the match. Jon's been running a K525i on his PRS rifle for quite a while, and he's a big fan of the SKMR4, so this is a reticle he already knows. KAHLES refined the 2026 line based on shooter feedback; Phil's breakdown video covers exactly what they changed.
Jon on the SKMR4: “It's a Christmas tree reticle, but it's not overly cluttered. It's really my style. I like having the ability to do holds when I want to, but I don't like some other reticles that have just so much going on.”
- Badger Condition One
- Diving board
- Flatline Ops Halo X
- Fast-settle level
Badger Condition One + Flatline Ops Halo X
Diving board mount for optionality. A level that settles instead of hunting.
The Badger Condition One carries a diving board out front. Jon isn't running a weapon-mounted laser RF — a Fire 4000, a Mars, that kind of unit — on this match. He and Greg are spotting and ranging as a team. The board is there so a unit can go on if he's ever shooting solo.
The Halo X has been on Jon's rifle for a few years and the reason is simple: when you adjust your cant, it settles fast. It doesn't keep moving after you stop the gun. He's used levels that were slow to correct — they tempt you into overcorrecting because you can't read where the bubble actually wants to live. That's a habit you don't want to build.
- KGM R30
- No brake
- ~6–7 months on it
KGM R30 suppressor
"I'll never go back to a muzzle brake."
Jon picked up the R30 not long after moving to Texas. Six or seven months in, the comparison is settled. He'll never go back to a muzzle brake.
There's no brake on the end of it, so it isn't doing what a hybrid does for recoil reduction. Doesn't matter. Even in a lighter NRL Hunter configuration, on a 6.5 Creedmoor or a .308 — anything with a little more recoil than your typical 6mm — the impulse stays manageable. What he keeps coming back to is what the can buys around the recoil number: with a can, you can talk to your spotter, your teammate, and the guys on the line. You're not married to earpro all day.
Jon doesn't run earpro under the can in open terrain. He'll put it back in if he's shooting somewhere with an overhang and it actually gets loud. Read the room — and check your local laws.
Match-day support
The last two pieces are the ones every stage runs through — the bipod that has to catch whatever angle the terrain throws at you, and the load that has to put a round on a small steel plate at an unknown distance and not miss. Get these wrong and the rest of the rifle doesn't save you.
- MDT CKYE-POD
- Gen 1 triple-pull
- OEM legs
- In-spec @ 16 lb
MDT CKYE-POD — Gen 1 triple-pull
OEM configuration. No fat trimmer, no carbon legs.
Second NRL Hunter match running the triple-pull. Jon set this rifle up to make weight with the CKYE-POD in its OEM configuration — no fat trimmer, no carbon legs, nothing trimmed off the bipod to keep the whole package under the 16-pound cap.
Hunter terrain throws curveballs. Stages get built around rocks, prop edges, awkward bipod-to-ground distances you can't always plan for. Jon enjoys natural terrain that forces you to figure things out on the clock — and triple-pulls are the right tool when you don't know in advance how tall you need to be.
- 147 ELD-M
- Lapua brass
- H4350
- ~2,753 fps
Hornady 147 ELD-M handload
Lapua brass, H4350, sitting around 2,753 fps.
147 ELD-M projectiles in Lapua brass over H4350. Jon runs it right around 2,750 — “2753 is usually where I'm sitting.” The groups are honest, the SD and ES numbers are clean off the chrono, and he shot it the week before at a one-day NRL Hunter Games as a tune-up — no elevation surprises across the whole day.
This is the load that went into Snake River.
Buy once, cry once — but we also completely understand this stuff can get expensive. Do your homework before you pull the trigger.
What's next
The Red Beard build came next.
On camera in February, Jon said the next version would look a lot like this one: the barrel and action might change a little, and everything else would largely stay the same. The TL3 has been reliable. The one thing he'd spec differently on a custom action is the top rail. He looks for an integrated top rail and recoil lug, and the TL3 has the lug but not the rail. "Personally, it's never been an issue for me, but it's just one more potential point of failure." The Proof carbon prefit has held up well enough that the carbon-fiber-walks-on-you internet wisdom doesn't match his logbook.
The next rifle came from Red Beard Gun Works, built for Jon to shoot NRL Hunter Teams with Phil: a Defiance action machined into Red Beard's Mjolnir action. Jon's instructor page has the current spec sheet.
Train with us
Bring your rifle. We'll help you build the rest.
Knowing what's on the rifle is one piece. Knowing how to drive it under match pressure is the other. Come to a Cadre course and put rounds against steel with the same crew running this build at matches.