The $500 AR: Buy or Build

I'm 57 this year. And by anyone's standards, I'm part of the older generation! My ideas and perceptions were shaped during the 60's, and that includes my thoughts on guns as well as other things.

I was born in 1960 and we moved to the United States in 1968, so obviously, the Vietnam War was a big part of it. 

And in the Psyche of a pre-teen/early teen of that ear; the most advanced infantry weapon ever was the M-16. OK..... let me start by saying, that, for today, I'm not here to argue the merit of this Eugene Stoner design. I'm discussing the basis of my fascination for it. 

When you compare it with it's immediate predecessor, the M-14, it's clearly a completely different animal. And if you compare it against the weapon of the "bad guys" (the AK47), it just looks more advanced. 

Fast forward 3-4 decades and several generations, the M-16 goes through the A1 to A3 versions and comes out the other end as the M-4 Carbine. The military has refined the old battle rifle originally designed for it's small-statured Asian allies into a modern "platform". One that can do just about anything given the wide variety of equipment that can be attached to it at will. But the best thing?

It's become that thing that Americans most love...... a standardized "open platform". What does that mean? It's the PC of the gun lovers! One can literally buy every single component from a different manufacturer, have most of it mailed directly to your house and put them together yourself with a minimum of tools. And on Black Friday, you could do it for less than $400!

After I got my handgun situation squared away, and the reloading setup running; the pressure was too much. I started looking for parts to do my own build. Maybe I should back up here. As always, I studied the market first, and found that a decently working plain-Jane AR15 could be bought for between $500-600 from one of the big-box outfits if I watched the sales. That would mean a workable (along the lines of what you see above), ..... a "smooth-top" (no rear sights or optic), plain (generic hand-guard and butt stock known as "furniture"), and pretty much bottom end everything. Don't get me wrong. These things are still Mil-spec and will shoot well all day long. But I wanted more......and I didn't want to pay more. I wanted more, for $500. How does that get done?

If you're reading me on this blog, but have read my stuff on my technology blog as well, then you already know. I research obsessively. What I found was that everything I already knew about computer buying/building applied to guns (especially the AR) as well. 

1. You don't save money by building your own gun.
2. A quality gun is an expensive gun.
3. There are no secrets in the AR world.
4. If you build your own, you can easily build a messed up gun.
5. It's fun.

So; as we've already discussed, the baseline is $500-600 (barring special sales and such). I also learned that the price for a used one isn't much better. I looked on the online listings and prowled a lot of pawn shops. Most importantly, I learned that you can get nicer parts for not much more money if you build your own. So I went in that direction. Early on, I began to see a company being commonly described as being a cut above the entry level, but at the same time, relatively inexpensive. This was Aero Precision from Tacoma, Washington. Apparently, they had been a long standing contractor that provided parts and set out on their own when the "blackgun boom" happened. 

In the midst of looking at "lowers", which is the "frame" of that which composes, officially the gun, since it has the serial number on it, I found a place in Texas that was selling a "complete lower" (one with all the parts installed) for $135. I had learned that the cheapest a "stripped lower" gets is $50, ..... and that's for a generic one. The LPK or lower parts kit which includes all the little pieces for the trigger group and safety is another $50-60. Then you have the "buffer tube" (that thing sticking out the back that the stock is mounted on), is another $25-30 or so including the buffer and spring. Then you have the grip and stock for another $15-20. So yeah, I was ahead of the game with a completely built one at a lesser price! So I bought it.....

Now, although I owned a gun, the majority of the parts to make it work didn't exist yet .... at least not on my AR! Most of the cost of building AR is connected to the "Upper" ($65-85), not the upper itself which isn't generally very expensive, but the expense is in things like the barrel, the bolt carrier group (BCG) and the front hand-guard. 

Let's start with this. What you see here is actually 3 parts: the barrel itself, the gas block, and the gas tube. A plain cheap-o one will set you back about $100 or so..... maybe $125 with the gas block and gas tube. But..... you guessed it...... I wanted something special. I didn't want either the .223 Remington or the 5.56 NATO chambering since you can't shoot the 556 in the 223, and the 223 isn't very accurate in the 556. I wanted a .223 Wylde, which is a hybrid chambering that shoots both well. On top of that, I didn't want the typical 1:7 twist rate that doesn't do a good job of stabilizing lightweight bullets (eg. anything under 55gr). I wanted a 1:8 or 1:9 which is considered a good compromise that will handle heavier 62/77gr as well as the little bullets down to 40gr. I know..... OCD, aren't I!?! It gets worse. I also wanted a "mid-length" gas port which isn't as far down as the rifle (since I wanted a 16" barrel), but not as short as the "carbine-length" which can be "over-gassed". Plus the mid-length is thought to shoot nicer. We'll see. One more thing, I'd like to have the barrel in stainless please! They tend to be more accurate!

On to the handguard. In case you didn't notice, the stock M4 style version depicted above. My thoughts on it? Uhhhh, no, that'd be a H*** NO!!! First of all; I want it to "free-float", meaning that I want it to attach at the receiver end only and not touch the barrel anywhere else. Secondly, I want it to have a continuous top rail, but none anywhere else. Thirdly, I want it to be slim instead of the bulky "quad-rails" that are the typical upgrade from the M4 stock handguard. I also wanted the modular attachment style to be the M-Lok(versus the Keymod) which is depicted on the lower of the pictures. The goal? Weight, comfort to hold and ease of attachment for anything I need/want to add. Oh yeah, these can cost anywhere from $150 to $200 depending on length. I'd prefer to 15 incher so it covers almost all the 16" carbine length barrel.

Then, there's this..... the Bolt Carrier Group (BCG), which includes the actual bolt, the bolt carrier, and the firing pin. They can run from $65 all the way up to well over $300, depending on the maker, and the coating. The basic design is the GI Phosphate coating which can be hard to clean, then it goes up to Black Nitride, Nickle-Boron that finishes out the fairly "normal" types. These are roughly $30-40 either way of $100. I wanted something a little better than the typical so that it'd be easy to clean, but I didn't want to pay big money for this.

So; how did I answer all these questions? You already know about the lower for $135. As it turns out, I actually answered the upper just about as easily. What happened is that, after I bought the lower, I started researching uppers/monitoring websites. And came across a "complete upper" (means, having all parts barring bolt carrier group and charge handle) on Gunbroker that had pretty much everything I wanted which at that point was bidding at $265. That's an Aero M4E1 upper, 16" Stainless, mid-length gas ported barrel chambered in .223 Wylde, complete with an Aero 12" free-floating handguard! Turns out, after a week and a half of watching it (while watching "Black Friday" sales), no body bid on it. So I got it for $265, plus the guy only charged $10 to ship it tome from Wisconsin! The next day, I caught a sale on an APOC Armory black-nitride BCG with charging handle for $91 shipped.  

So, meet my little $497.20 "little friend"...... OK, so I need to get some random little stuff like sights, etc., but still...... I'm pretty satisfied with how this has gone. 

The Missing Box

I have a Love/Hate relationship with UPS. I get a lot of packages, so delivery services are an important part of my life. Back in the old days, without a doubt, UPS was the best. It wasn't even a close contest. Then, the strike happened, and it's never been the same since. Around here, in today's world, I'd rank them tied for 2nd with Fedex behind USPS. DHL is definitely last. The reason they're low? The distribution center for the Dallas area is terrible. Now, I have another reason to rank them lower.....

If you'll indulge me by turning back the calendar to late spring, you might remember that I got a Lenovo 4K monitor that wasn't working and RMA'd it back to them since it was under warranty. At this point, the whole thing turned into a comedy of errors. 

We'll start this with Lenovo, mishandling this by having me return it to Best Buy, then sending it back saying that they don't repair monitors. That was followed by me contacting them and receiving a promise that they'd "look into it". This was followed by a company I never heard of sending me an email stating that I was to receive a package. No mention what the package was or why. Tracking then indicated that this mystery package was delivered, but there was no package at my house.

As you might imagine; this led to contact with UPS, and ultimately Lenovo who told me that the mystery company was a distributor and the box was my replacement monitor! Furthermore, UPS showed that the package was delivered successfully!!! This then led to a 4 month back-and-forth between myself and Lenovo with me getting progressively more agitated and them convinced that I was trying to get another free monitor. 

Then this happened. Out-of-the-blue, the doorbell rings yesterday afternoon when no one was expected. At the door was an older woman with 3 young kids that I figured, must be trying to sell something. What she had to say was that she lives at 102 Redwood (we live at 120) and that there was a package addressed to me that they've "had for a while"...... Would I like to come down and get it. Up the street at their house in the entryway where apparently it's been since MAY 28th, was my monitor!!! They've had it for over 4 months!!! It hadn't been opened, nor indeed, moved. They just hadn't felt the need to get it to the addressee. I'm not sure who to be angry at!?! Lenovo for it's abysmal communications, UPS for the dyslexic driver, or the strangely unmotivated neighbor? I guess, in the end, I'm just glad I got my monitor.

A Bigger Bang for The Frugal Propellerhead Buck!

I'm sure some of you could see where all this BB/Pellet gun stuff was leading, right? Yup, after lots of not so subtle hints and months of gun magazines laying around the house, I finally dropped the bomb on my wife this weekend. What happened was that we were doing the family birthdays early since my in-laws are going on an extended "fall foliage" trip to the Northeast starting this week. Mine, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's birthdays all fall within a couple of week of the end of September and beginning of October. So, my wife has been harrassing me about what I wanted for my birthday, which has always been a bit of a chore anyway since my interest tends toward the esoteric. 

I finally decided to shoot straight (I know, terrible), and tell her I wanted a handgun. No, not the PPK with a suppressor. My love of all things James Bond only goes so far; not that I don't love the PPK! More on this later. Over the course of the whole pellet gun adventure, she had been quizzing me about my interest in guns anyway. And I had filled her in on my long-standing interest in the things going back to when I actually owned a number of them in my younger years before we ever met. I had subsequently sold them when I was working in higher education and living "on campus" where I couldn't have them.  But I've always had an abiding interest in them both from a historical (collecting) standpoint as well as to shoot them....

..... at one point owning a couple of different Ruger Mk II semi-automatics in .22LR and a Ruger Security Six along with a Marlin 995 Semi-auto .22LR and Rossi Model 62 copy of the old Winchester pump .22 design.

Do I wish I would have kept them all those years ago? Probably, but that's water under the bridge now. My interests are less in revolvers and 19th century designs anyway, so on to what's going on now!

At the moment; this is the target. The "Wonder 9s", or more specifically..... modern, polymer-framed, high-capacity, striker-fired, 9mm handguns. There's a lot of them out there, ranging from the rather pedestrian Smith & Wesson M & P (Military & Police) for $350 to $400, to the $800-$900 H&K/Sigs or the ubiquitous Glocks at the middle price-point. features and performance tend to be fairly similar, but the build quality and country of origin. The progression on price/build-quality equation seems to go from import to American made back to import (from Germany, Austria or Switzerland) going from low to high. So, firearms from manufacturers like Taurus, Star, etc. from places like Spain and Brazil tend to be lower. Then we get American manufacturers such as Smith & Wesson in the middle, followed of course, but the Glocks, H&Ks and Sig Sauer being the most expensive. 

Then you have a few "out-lyers" in the market such as this Canik made in Turkey which is a copy of the Walther P99 and of excellent quality according to virtually all reviews as well as..

the well-known and well-thought of CZ offering such as the above CZ-75 made in the Czech Republic. So, what am I interested in?

This is the one. The Walther PPQ M1. Why not the Bond-esque P99? Yes, it's a fine pistol, but here's my reasoning. 

• The main-line Walther grips feel great in my smallish hands, whether that be the P99 or the PPQ and indeed the compact CCP as well.
• The PPQ is often referred to as the updated and improved P99 with a better double-action trigger system.
• The PPQ has the standard M1913 Picatinny rail that makes it easier to mount laser and such on to.
• The P99 has been out of production for several years and the "first version" (which I like best) tends to be difficult to find and when found tends to be at least $100 (or more), more expensive than the PPQ. This is probably the deciding factor.

However, there's a couple of other possibilities as well.

One is the Canik which of course is a Walther copy, but barring finding a PPQ/P99 at an affordable price, there's also a "dark horse"; the Magnum Research MR9 Eagle. It's a Walther P99 polymer frame, with a Magnum Research stainless slide mounted. This German-American cooperative effort came in two flavors, with the one you see here as half and inch longer than the 4" version. Most critically, they aren't well known and as a result sometimes sell for substantially less than either the P99 or PPQ. No you know. I'll update you guys when I've locked onto a target!

The "Next Level" Workstation

And so it begins...... the project to upgrade my "Blackbird" workstation. It's current configuration of Intel Z77 chipset powered by an i7-3770 of the "Ivy Bridge" generaton has just about run it's course as a front-line workstation.

My decision is to move away from the "enthusiast" route toward the true workstation hardware.  Which means choosing a processor from the Xeon line instead of the consumer oriented "Core" line. These CPUs pretty much can't be overclocked, which is something I don't engage in anyway. Of course, there are other features as well, after weighing the pluses and minus, I decided a high core count and low cost was the way to go leading me to a Xeon E5-2630L which is a low powered (55w) chip with 8 cores on board! I decided that even at a slow 1.8Ghz clock speed would be fine for 16 hyper-threaded cores. For what I do, and it's $85 cost, this would be a great LGA-2011-3 starting point.

 Of course, there's always a "fly in the ointment" in one way or another. Right now, it's the cost of DDR4 memory. So, I'm going to start with 16Gb. I know...... woe is me!!! Well, it is a downgrade for me since I'm running with 32Gb right now. I'll get 16Gb more at some point in the next year which will get me halfway to the 64Gb capacity. I can live with that. Other bugs?

 

Well..... there is this little thing..... I bought a board that was inexpensive because it has some bent pins. So, yeah.... I have got a tedious little task in front of me to get them all straightened. It isn't a trivial task, but I've done it before.

A fun weekend to look forward to, but after that....... Blackbird Mk II flies again!

The $50 Gaming PC Upgrade for My Son

A few of you might recognize my son's gaming machine. It was built around an ASRock H67 Mini-ITX LGA-1155 board which began life with a Sandy Bridge i5 CPU. It's nVidia GTX 650 got upgraded to a GTX 750ti last year. With an Intel 160Gb SSD paired with a Samsung 500Gb drive for mass storage. Over the 2 to 3 years of it's life, it's been a pretty nice machine and my son has been very happy with it. 

 

Let's be clear here: my son isn't playing heavy duty first person shooter games like Metro Last Light, or Skyrim! He's more of a Minecraft kid....

In the last year or so, he has gotten more into Steam so there is a bit of a progression. 

Although, his current favorite (Subnautica) isn't particularly challenging for the hardware either. However, me being me..... I'm always keeping an eye out for upgrades, and in my world, $50 is around the price of an "impulse buy" that doesn't require a lot of planning.

It all started with this; the EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.. I saw it on the local Craigslist for $65, offered $50 and it went into his computer knowing full-well that he didn't need it.

Then came this.....the famous "Igloo" case, or the Carbide 380t by Corsair which is it's actual name. I've always wanted to get this case and do something fun in it ever since I first saw it. However, it's a little pricey and damn hard to find. A few months after the 750ti, I saw this on CL for $50 (firm), so I gave the guy his money and it sat in the corner of my office with no particular job for most of a year. It came without screws, fans or anything else, but what self-respecting builder doesn't have tons of that stuff sitting around. 

About a month after that, I found this; an ASRock H110M-ITX/ac for..... you guessed it..... $50 on Craigslist...... The board was practically "new in the box" and now I had my first Skylake/Kabylake, DDR4 motherboard. I knew it was going into the 380t case, but had no idea what I was building it for....

To finish up with the theme here, I picked up an LGA1151 Intel Pentium G4400 for $50 on eBay. So, I'm up to $200 total, $50 at a time spread out over roughly a year. Admittedly, by this time, I knew what I was going to do with this machine which is why I went cheap on the Pentium vs. a more expensive Core i3/i5. Obviously, this thing was heading toward it's destiny of becoming my son's "new" gaming PC. Given the kind of games he plays at the moment, this CPU wouldn't be a problem.

At this point, my $50 theme breaks down, but hey; I did pretty good up till now, right!?! You're probably aware that DDR4 is pricey right now, and I'm kind of a "RAM guy". I refuse to use cheap and/or what I consider an inadequate amount. So, here are the issues:

• In the current computing world, 8Gb is pretty much the de-facto standard
• DDR4 is expensive- roughly $150 for 16Gb in 8Gb module pairs
• Mini-ITX boards routinely have 2 sockets for memory
• Individual 8Gb modules run $70 or more 

Which leaves me with the following scenario: Buy 1 stick of 8Gb at around $70 per,..... or buy a pair of 4Gb modules at around the same outlay, then at some point in the future when I want to upgrade, having to pull out what I have, to put in more. You can imagine what I ended up doing, right? I bit the bullet and bought a pair of Crucial Ballistix Tactical for $108. More than what I wanted to spend, but not terrible in the big pciture, as you'll see.

The last thing I needed to buy was a power supply. I found one of those Newegg sales that also had a "mail-in rebate". It was $37 on sale and the rebate will be $20 more, so yeah.... it's $17 dollars! That's more like it! Not fancy, but solid and will provide plenty enough power for anything that might go into this case, now or in the future. So, that's it. That's all I bought. There's more things that go into a computer, right?

Of course there is. It needed storage and some fans, along with a few cables. It got the 600Gb Intel 3500 from my workstation (it getting a rebuild soon, shhhhhh), the 2.5", 500Gb Samsung mechanical drive that was in his old machine for "mass storage", and a pair of NZXT FN V2, 140mm case fans that was left over from previoius projects. Of course, these didn't cost anything. These fans are so quiet, that my son commented on it. You might also be wondering if I have upgrades planned.

 

If pushed, I'd say that, over the life of this machine, at some point, it'll probably get the above upgrades. More powerful GPUs such as a GTX x60, x70, or a "10 Series" card appear on Craigslist inexpensively all the time, so that will most likely happen first. During it's mid-cycle time-frame, it'll probably get an Intel Core i5 along with a water cooler; not because it needs it, but because, he'll think it's "cool"! At this point, I've spent $325 spread out over a year to year and a half. I just sold his old machine (with the 750ti replaced with a 650, and 160Gb Intel SSD replaced with a 500Gb mechanical HDD) for $350, so I'm upgrade with a net $25 gain!