There is a glut of cheap AR's out there now. That's both good and bad, good in that they are affordable to just about everybody with plenty of money left over for a pile of ammo to practice/train with, bad in that you will take a deep loss if you try to sell it. If you don't have an AR, then by all means buy a kit gun on the cheap and shoot the crap out of it. I've yet to see anyone burn out a barrel or wear out parts with regular maintance.
I agree on buying while you can and prices are still ok. Ammo also. Times are a changing. Apparently about half the country has had their ball cut off and received a lobotomy. Makes me sick.
I got one like from there and it was $260. With the parts kit and all. To put it in/on a ruger lower. But I never put one together that wasn't select fire. I think next time I send off NFA paperwork I will just go on ahead and register it as an SBR. Mine is out for delivery today. My wife asked what was getting delivered... She didn't believe how much I spent on it since I have bitched about the price of AR15s for a decade.
I got mine all together with a bare ruger lower. Everything went together great. Have not shot it yet.
I'm going to have the say the PSA upper is definitely a beater AR upper. With a cold or barely warm barrel it could probably do about 4 moa. But when it gets hot you are looking at more of a bullet sprayer. Groups open up to more like 12 to 16 moa. So much for the myth that AR15 are always so accurate. This is kind of what I expected even with AR15 fan boys telling me it will be super accurate. I'm pretty sure my warn out 40 year old mini 14 shoots better.
That's awful not acceptable for an AR or any kind of rifle. If you have the tools I'd consider removing the barrel, clean everything up, lube the threads with AeroShell then reassemble with proper torgue. It also may just be a crappy barrel. In that case I'd either swap it or sell the entire upper.
A suspiciously identical looking upper is available from armalite with out a parts kit for $600. So $260 with a lower parts kit, I can't complain too much. The lower is made by ruger, so it's not one of the plastic junk home made jobs. The optic is my new from 2010 leupold cqt mk4. I just need to get a slower rate of fire, time to cool and get some cold to mildly warm shots on paper. Try something else besides M193 style rounds, some 62 and 70gr stuff. Since I'm traditionally a mini14 guy I only have 55gr and smaller 223 ammo laying around. Literally every shot to shit M16A2 I ever qualified with shot better with the A2 peep site. I did shoot once with a almost new colt M4 that was the straightest shooting one ever. It would have likely did less than 2 moa, even after being all warmed up with a real scope on it. Worst case scenario I lose the barrel and turn that upper into something else. I already cut the A frame off so they probably won't take it back anyway.
The AR guru has spoken. A guy that started working on them in the army, then for his local police department. He has been working on them probably longer than I have been alive. If they ban ARs this guy will probably starve to death because he is old now and that's all he can still do. The AR guru, a friend of a friend says that it may be a gas port bur those can be shot out eventually (maybe), the head spacing could be messed up or the barrel could be crap. He says the only time he sees ones this messed up is when people who don't know what they are doing try to assemble their own upper, usually without head space gauges and it doesn't blow up. Going into this I accepted that these things could be made from piles of reject parts and that it's accuracy may be measured in minutes of crown vic. The good thing about it, it was 100% reliable. Nothing happened besides ejecting the spent brass, and feeding in another round till the mag ran dry. Not even the much more accurate .gov M16A2 and M4 rifles I shot could say that. So accuracy it sucks, for reliability its up there with AK47s and duct tape.
