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Old 03-21-2020, 03:00 PM
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BB57 BB57 is offline
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Originally Posted by Engine49guy View Post
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.../ On the other hand you can buy a complete PSA AR15 for around $400.

Comes down to asking yourself do I want to put $300 into an inferior rifle.../
That's a pretty harsh comparison to a $400 AR-15 from PSA.

Don't get me wrong, I have more than my fair share of AR-15s, including both low end PSA made AR-15s, as well as vintage Colt SP1s and Sporter IIs, as well as high end builds for various specific purposes (varmint hunting, service rifle competition, etc).

However, I also have a 184 series Mini 14 and a 187 series Ranch Rifle and I paid around $400 (used) for each of them.

Both of them have been relentlessly reliable (pro tip" stick with Ruger magazines), and both are capable of the same consistent 1.5 MOA 5 shot groups at 100 yards as my Colt SP1s and M16A1 upper (on an NDS 601 lower), using the same 55 gr Hornady FMJBT handloads at roughly M193 velocity.

Both of them are far superior to my PSA AR-15. It was a piece of ****. About half of it was salvageable and the rest of it is sitting in a box somewhere, with a bunch of spare parts, not worth the $50 or so it would cost me to get a lower for it and reassemble with already on hand spare parts.

Now...to be fair to get that level of accuracy in an early Mini 14 will cost some additional money. An Accu Strut barrel stabilizer cost $100, and a Choate flash hider/front sight cost another $50. Shock buffers are cheap and I turn my own undersized gas port bushings for basically nothing (but they are an $8-$10 part anyway). I also added Tech Sights rear sights to each of them ($80) just because it's a much better sight.

So it took about $160 to turn a 4-5 MOA rifle into a 1.5 MOA rifle, and another $80 to add a higher quality aftermarket sight.

That's still a $640 rifle, and I have come across a lot of AR-15s that cost north of $640 that won't hold consistent 5 shot 1.5 MOA groups, and I've come across a lot more (and been issued a few M16s) that were nowhere near as reliable.

And $640 is still less than what I had into my PSA AR-15 to get it up to an acceptable minimum standard.

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From that perspective, if someone has a Mini-14 and wants a well made, functional and practical folding stock to reduce the overall length for a truck gun, etc., $280 probably isn't too much to pay.
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