Modern rifles aren’t anything like the boat anchors that our forefathers carried into combat. But they can still be heavy and annoying to lug around a battlefield or take up crucial weight in a survival kit. The guys at Bentwood Gunsmithing, in cooperation with Battle Arms Development, have created the ultimate lightweight rifle and have dubbed it the “OIP,” or Ounces Into Pounds. The idea was to shave every last ounce they could find, creating the most lightweight AR-15 ever produced . . .

The weight savings have been achieved in every single component. For example, they even went so far as to custom machine a titanium muzzle brake because the steel version was too heavy. The magazine well has been skeletonized to eliminate every bit of superfluous aluminum. And the buttstock isn’t much more than a small aluminum end cap on a minimalist buffer tube. Even the optic mount has been skeletonized, and there’s only a tiny rail section on the top of the gun to minimize the number of teeth.

The end result is hard to argue with — it’s without a doubt the lightest AR-15 rifle I have ever held. The thing tips the scales at a feathery 3.8 pounds, which is almost exactly half the weight of a standard AR-15 carbine. But all that savings in weight comes with a heavier price tag: $2,879. The OIP takes an insane number of man hours to make, so the guys are only going to be producing a maximum of 100 per year.