Assembling Your AR-15

If you can change a tire, you can assemble an AR-15.With some special tools,thoughtfully selected parts and a YouTube video, your personally configured rifle is just a couple of hours away.

- Colonel Bill Ball

By tailoring Eugene Stoner’s elegantly conceived and engineered AR-15 rifle platform, shooters can assemble a sporting firearm to tackle just about every shooting situation. Hundreds of manufacturers offer a vast smorgasbord of barrels, muzzle devices, handguards, triggers, pistol grips and buttstocks to fit many different upper and lower receivers.

Today’s AR-15 can be light or heavy, long or compact, accurate enough to exceptionally precise, relative affordable to “if you have to ask” expensive, loads of fun and super useful. The AR-15 platform can be anything from a crossbow, pellet rifle, rim fire plinker, home defense firearm, hunting rifle or precision target rifle. A recreational shooter can tackle everything from paper targets, zombies, prairie dogs, deer or even Jurassic Park-sized game.

A CUSTOM FIT

Troubled by varmint-induced damage to her garden and chickens, a friend asked for a low maintenance, lightweight, accurate rifle to control predators and pests. A semi-experienced female shooter, she wanted a safe and reliable rifle to fit her slender body, and tough enough to bounce around on an ATV.

With advice from other AR-15 shooters, some catalogs, and the internet, she selected high quality, light weight components for her rifle. Her choices included a polymer receiver set, UTG PRO Super Slim Free Float handguard, Spikes Tactical enhanced lower parts kit and trigger, Magpul CTR buttstock, and, importantly, the Superior Shooting Systems chrome silicon flat wire spring. The .223 Remington chambered WMD nickel boron coated barrel ended in a BattleComp multi-mode compensator.

Other choices exist from quality manufacturers, and advertisers in this magazine, but these part selections suited her preferences perfectly.