At what point would you trust a Franken gun?

[Paul053]

I've only bought one complete factory rifle, an LWRC and my other ar pattern rifle is a hobby gun I build myself (gunsmith built upper from parts I have brought him.) my hobby gun is built with high end parts (Vltor upper Bcm barrel and gas block and kmr and Bcm bcg) and lower is an AXTS/Radian lower geissele sdc, Axts safety, Vltor a5 buffer system. I've put 2k rounds of wolf steel case down the pipe without a single failure in a few classes. All cases eject to the 4 o'clock.

At what point would you trust a hobby gun like that? I understand tolerance stacking and because of that tried to buy as many parts from a single reliable source (bcm). Is round count a factor or more importantly how you shoot those rounds?

Thanks.

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[pointblank4445]

As the case with hand-loaded ammo, there's a certain confidence I have when I know and have overseen every element of assembly.

Assuming I know what I am doing, the margin for human error is similar as is the margin for defect in the raw materials.

That said, I can easily say my first AR builds are not in the same league as my more recent build,s and I didn't realize then completely all that I did not fully know or appreciate about the AR design. So to answer your question, I got my confidence through flawless function (2k seems sufficient) and detailed inspection of problem/wear areas.

 

[Yondering]

Just my take - with ARs it depends a lot on who "built" (meaning chose parts and assembled) the gun. A lot of the so-called brand name complete rifles available now are just as much "franken guns" as anything you'd put together in a basement. A guy who understands what he's doing can absolutely build a better rifle than a lot of what's available, if he's using quality parts and attention to detail in assembly.

On the other hand, if a guy isn't real sure what he's doing and just slaps the parts together, I wouldn't trust it for anything serious even after a bunch of rounds. I've seen parts loosen up after hundreds of rounds, because someone didn't assemble it right initially even though it was "good enough" for the first 500 rounds.