Atomic Nerds

All right, come on. Fess up. No one will be mad, I promise. It’s just that when I’ve heard for ages to greater or lesser degrees how unless you have the magical blessed punches of punchness and space galore and superhuman reflexes, building an AR lower is more an exercise in “Where’d that spring go?” and “Fit, dammit! Fit!” than anything a sane person might try.

I feel rather misled.

As has been noted, I was finally able to score a stripped AR-15 lower at a decent price (those feeling a sudden urge to chime in about how badly I got ripped off and they saw a full-auto LMT with the monolithic rail upper for fifty cents more than the transfer tax that came with a gold plated hooker and a bucket of blow can kindly fuck off - you try living in a market like Los Alamos for a few years and see if you don’t change your thoughts on “good deal” rather sharply). With the few shekels I had left in the fun department, I picked up a parts kit with a single stage trigger for this plinker/fun-gun/learning experience.

When the kit came in, I wandered over to ar15.com, home of all things black rifle (and more than a few creepy people in the political threads) where I remembered seeing a guide or three, and started eyeballing this guide (second post). For the most part, I’ve got to say that guide is pretty good. There are a few parts that took me a bit to figure out with the pictures as-posted, but that’s all it took to get mine put together.

For example, on the portion over there about putting the magazine catch and the magazine release button together, my natural inclination was to spin the button onto the post, rather than getting the button started, then jamming it down hard enough to let me spin the magazine catch on the other side of the rifle. This led to some wonderment at how the hell I would keep the button from twisting about, unscrewing itself, etc, until I re-read the instructions a time or three more. Yeah, sometimes I R gud at reding. Like you never missed the forest for the trees when you first dipped your toe into something brand new?

My second minor nitpick is that in this picture, it would have made things considerably clearer much more quickly if they had the bolt catch roll pin sticking out of the hole slightly as was described in the previous step. Again, nothing major but when you’re sitting there afraid you’re going to get a pin stuck somewhere it shouldn’t be and then have to drill it out or resort to other drastic measures, every little bit helps. Likewise, a separate picture showing the proper position of the hammer spring before the hammer was installed, and a minor note that the pointy end of the safety detent goes in pointing up would’ve saved me ten minutes or so overall. Yes, I can hear all you folks that can build these in your sleep laughing. Gimme a break here, one or two more and I’ll be napping during the build too.

So anyway, the overall build time was probably just about 90 minutes spread over a couple evenings when I could do a step or two between other chores. The only tools I needed were a leatherman and a dental pick, and the only significant problem I ran into was with the bolt catch spring — the original that came in the kit was slightly oversized, and didn’t provide any actual springiness when in the proper hole as it just bound up against the sides. Twenty minutes with the dental pick and the one and only launched spring of the project finally got it out, and once I ordered a replacement, everything went together like butter.

So is barreling an upper, what with all the fidgity-sounding terms like “staking the gas key” and such this easy too?

(Red stuff indicates where I ran into WTF moments. Clicking these pictures will take you to larger versions for closer inspection.)

Posted Arms races, Ballistic Mood Improvers |