80% of the price gets you 98% of the performance in many areas of life. Chasing that last 2% can take all your money and all your time. The older I get, the less I think it's worthwhile.
Agreed. I only 1 that I bought off the shelf, and a pile of them I've assembled from part, the last one I did had nothing pre-assembed. I did buy a set of headspacing gauges just to be 100% sure the upper went together right, and it did. ARs are about the simplest guns you can assemble, IMHO. I price surf for a good deal on a barrel, or upper and just collect that parts I want to put it together once I've found them all; easy-peasy.Nope....plug and play. Quite easy if your mechanically inclined. Need a couple of specialty tools just to make it easier. 25 bucks for an armorers wrench. Punches and nice small hammer. Vise block set if your gonna do an upper. Torque wrench is a nice plus.
Now....dont get me wrong. You can spend gozillions puttin one together and I admit I shop super hard for components (price wise)
Fixed it for ya'!I have both preassembled and home-brewed-concoction ARs.
I find a great pride of ownership of the ones I assembled.
Knowledge of building a "from-scratch" anything is simply a good life skill to have IMO.
I get a bit crazy at times to call it spare cash. My problem is that once I see those "Oh Cool" parts, it's hard to downgrade.I had several different uppers for my M16A2 that were not on any lowers. I started my first assembly when Primary Arms had a deal on Aero stripped lowers.
I could have bought a complete lower for what I put into that stripped lower. Now I have 5 Aero lowers that I put together. Putting them together is something to do when I get bored & got a little spare cash.
Everyone should put at least one together. It teaches you a few things you might not know about them.
I missed out on a Aero .308 upper & lower that was listed here cheap when I had a doctors appointment on the day the deal was to go down. I still have not assembled a .308 AR, nor have I ventured into a 9mm.