Video: How-To - AR-15 Upper and Lower Receiver Builds

Speaker 1:
Hey, everybody. Ben with Classic Firearms here. Today is Thursday, April the 13th and hopefully we have something interesting for you guys here today. We're going to see how it works out. We have with us two of our very capable customer service people here. We have Matt and Dillon. Both of these guys, I'm not going to call them gunsmiths by any stretch of the imagination, but both of them have assembled their own AR-15s, they're competent shooters, know a lot about the AR-15s. We've got all the parts necessary to build an AR-15 rifle here laid out on the table. I'm going to pitch it to these guys and they're going to give you a little crash course on what it takes to put together your own rifle, so Matt, Dillon, take it away. Start with the lower? For our lower receiver, you need very little tooling. Mostly a hammer or some needle nose pliers will come in handy. If you have a set of roll pin punches, that would be extremely helpful as well, but not necessary. When I'm assembling the lower, the first thing I like to assemble is the bolt catch. The bolt catch has three parts. It should be right in here. You have the plunger, the actual bolt catch, and a plunger spring. Then there's the roll pin to install that. It's real simple. You're going to put the spring in the plunger, the bolt catch itself, kind of hold that down, and you're going to install the roll pin. I found if you put a little masking tape on the side of the receiver you can just tap it in gently with a hammer, but again that's one of those times where you might want a punch to get it started at least. Second thing would probably be the magazine catch. Magazine catch, very simple. Three components, the catch, the button, spring. It's real simple. You put the catch in this side, put the spring in this side, push down, put the button on, and then usually you're going to kind of push all the through and spin the catch until it's going to be about even with the threading on the outside of that button. After that, we'll start with the trigger components. We have the trigger, this connector. They'll be a small spring between these two and then also obviously the pins and the trigger spring. You're going to install the trigger spring. It's going to hook up underneath this front lip. You're going to have the disconnector sitting down on top of there. You're going to push this down in, make sure that the feet kind of rest on the bottom receiver, and then you'll work your trigger spring through. After that, we'll install the hammer. It'll be the hammer, hammer pin, and hammer spring. The spring for the hammer is going to rest on the backside of the hammer, come around these posts, and you're actually going to install it where there's the two little legs sitting on top of the trigger pin to provide tension on that. Once you get it kind of set in place, you're just going to squish it down, get it lined up with the hole, and install the hammer pin. After that, you would normally move to your safety. You're going to make sure that the hammer's cocked back so that the safety is able to play back and forth. Otherwise, it's going to be really hard to try to get this through here. You're going to insert the safety in here and the safety is held in place by a detent spring underneath. At that point, we can go ahead and probably install the handle to make sure that this doesn't move anywhere. The hammer has a small hole here in which you're going to put the detent spring, drop the detent in here. As you're working this handle on, you're going to want to make sure not to kink the spring, but once it's in place, you can kind of hold it in place, come through the bottom, put your screw in place. That's going to secure everything down for there. After that, the front pivot pin. Now this can be really tricky because you're dealing with a very small detent, a very small spring, and not a lot of room to work on. I suggest getting something flat like a razor blade and I usually start off with putting the spring in place, pushing down with a pair of needle nose pliers, and then trying to capture that with the razor blade, push down until it's as flat as possible. That should give you enough clearance to be able to put that pin in place and you'll have your front pin. Once you remove the razor blade, it'll pop up and be captured in this little channel on the bottom, so that's not going to go anywhere. The rear pin is back here. It also has a spring detent that actually comes through the back. This is going to be installed in conjunction with your whole buffer assembly. The easiest thing there, take the buffer, move your castle nut up all the way to the rear, and put your end plate on so bumped face is toward the receiver. It's going to be captured by this little kind of space here. Go ahead and start that into place and you're going to get a good judgment for where that spring is going to stick out to because you don't want to kink this spring either and it's real easy as you're turning it. You're also going to need to keep in mind how close you are up front because there's going to be the buffer retainer and spring here. Once you kind of just barely don't capture the buffer retainer, so right about there, we can install that spring and buffer retainer. That way, just as we get to that next go around, it will hold that in place. Make sure you put your rear pin in the detent and spring. We can kind of just kick it out just a little bit, put it in here, make sure to pull this all the way to the back, adjust it over until it's straight, push that tightly against there, and then we can tighten down with our castle nut. Now this is where the one real specialized tool comes in place and that is a barrel wrench. The barrel wrench is going to have some special teeth where you'll be able to capture this nut and give it a good torque down. After that, simply push down on the retainer. Oh, sorry. There's the barrel wrench. You can see this end is for the installation of your castle nut. You're just kind of able to wrap it around here and give it a good torque down. There's not a specific torque rating that I'm aware of for that, but you're just going to want to make sure that that's tight. After that's installed, you can push down on your retainer, install your buffer spring and buffer, and you're going to end up with a product that looks basically like this. You can see where we had the bolt catch, the mag catch, trigger, hammer, all those springs, safety, pivot fin take down pin, handle, and buffer assembly. All that will probably take 15 minutes if you kind of practiced at it, but just make sure to work safely and carefully because you are going to have a lot of little springs. You don't want to lose anything, but we do sell Oops kits if you do. Matt, before you're done. Dillon, let me get in there for just a moment. I want to ask Matt just a couple of questions. Number one, where is that lower receiver you were working on there? You were talking about all the small parts and the trigger and all that. All those parts are contained in our lower parts kit? That's right and we have several options for lower parts kits actually. We have Anderson lower parts kits, Anderson lower parts kits with stainless steel hammer and trigger in case you want something that's got a little bit smoother of an action, and we have this enhanced part kit is what we were demonstrating. It's got this nice molded grip and I mean, it's fantastic. On our completed upper here that we have, this is a Bear Creek upper completely assembled- Lower. Excuse me, lower. Thank you. That's why I let these guys do it instead of me. This is a Bear Creek lower. Comes assembled from Bear Creek. This is considered the firearm itself, folks, because it is the serial number portion of the rifle that carries on the lower receiver, but you can see it has a standard AR pistol grip on it. Our enhanced kit has this wrap around pistol grip. It is an imported kit. I can't tell the difference. Some say one does as good a job as another if you happen to like that. I happen to like that with the grips and the protection for the thumb, but anyway, there's my two cents there. Also, I saw that you were working with a Mag Tactical lower. We have those in stock right now at a good price. Tell us your thoughts on that Mag Tactical lower. Well, so I really like the Mag Tactical. It's a very lightweight lower. You can just pick up the difference and feel the weight difference. It's probably 30% lighter. It does require a special pin for the trigger and hammer, but it comes with them so there's no problem there and I mean, one of the kind of nice things about it is one part I neglected or remembered to mention is that most lowers, you actually have to also install the trigger guard and a great about that, one less step, something that saves you a little bit of time. They're a great quality lower. They feel very solid when you put them together. Actually my current rifle I'm building right now is a 762 by 39 rifle that's using one of these. Before we move along, let me answer some questions that we do get on the Mag Tactical lowers. Folks, I've said this before, our best selling lower historically has always been the Anderson and I think that will probably continue to be the case into the future. Anderson is so well known. They produce a great product. We're not trying to take anything away from the Anderson lowers. Everybody here has built on Anderson lowers and they're wonderful and good people and a good company to work with. What makes this Mag Tactical lower so attractive right now, when Mag Tactical was selling on the marketplace a year ago, these lowers, because of the quality they are and because of the unique proprietary blend that they have in the metal and they're so lightweight, these things were selling at retail anywhere from 99.99 to 129.99. What happened was, and I've just got permission from the new owner to tell this story. What happened was a company called Fostech went in and purchased Mag Technical. They bought up all the machinery, all he blueprints, all the proprietary engineering, all of that type of thing to start building their own product wheel. Dillon and I met the owners of Fostech. Nice people. They do a really good job, but when they bought the company, they also bought all of the old inventory. Now their goal was to start producing their own lowers and uppers under the Fostech brand name. Because they don't want Mag Industry confusion once they start putting out their own lower and it's going to be, aside from the name and the design on the front of the lower, it's going to be identical to this one. Different roll set-up. Yeah, exactly. The same proprietary blend, same weight. It's going to be the same as this. They are a manufacturer. They are not a reseller. We have a relationship with them. They know that we can move product, so they came to us and said, "Guys, if we give you a tremendous price on this lower, can you take it to marketplace and help us clear out all this old inventory." That's what we're doing and they're selling very, very well. They should be because they're selling at 25% of the price that they were selling at before. Nothing wrong with this. People say, "If it's so good, why is it so cheap?" It's cheap because we're closing them out. When Fostech comes out with their own branded lower, don't expect to get this lower at this price on the marketplace. I'm saying that to say this. There's a limited number of these. They're not making them anymore. When they're gone, they're gone and we are literally blowing through these things. Folks, if you want one, I would say get 10, 15, 20 of them, put them on your shelf, stock up now because then they will be gone. That's my pitch on the Mag Tactical. Dillon, come in here and tell us about uppers. Hey, we had a little break there, guys. We were going to throw it to Dillon and then we got interrupted by somebody opening the door. Here's the deal. Dillon's new fiance just showed up here. Evidently, it's something important. She's out there in the lobby. I've met her before. Have you met his fiance? I have. Would you not stop and go take of her if you were him? I would immediately drop everything I was doing. Absolutely, I would too. Dillon, we're going to excuse you to go take care of Ms. Kayla and I'm going to ask Matt if he would just continue to finish out this video. Matt, take it away on the upper. We have a couple of options for upper receivers as well. We have a T-marked option and a non-T-marked option from our US contractor. Now they're a supplier that Ben's talked about before. Can't release their name because they build for some of the largest contracts in the US, but we have some other options. I think we have a stripped Anderson upper, maybe a Bear Creek, but right now I'm going to hold this T-marked US contractor upper. These are great quality uppers and going through an upper build may be a little bit more difficult than a lower build, but there are less parts. You just need to be careful about the assembly. I would say the first thing I would do on a stripped upper would be to go ahead and install the dust cover. You're going to get the kit like this. It's got the ... I don't know, rod, I'd guess you call that. There's a C clip, a small spring, and the actual door. Basically, this is a very simple installation. A little tricky on the fingers, but you're going to put your C clip in. You're going to go through here halfway. Three hands. Spring and it's going to come out the end. You're going to just kind of thread this through. The tricky part about this is the spring because you're going to have to wind this at least one half way around to give it the tension to close. Once you've got that installed, then you're just going to kind of test and make sure that the detent on top works, but the detent in this case actually comes pre-installed, so you're probably getting tired of hearing us use the word "detent." Once that's in, the forward assist, very easy. It's just the all with the spring and a roll pin. You're going to put it in, press down slightly, start driving the roll pin through. You don't want to press down too hard because it will become bound and you can bend that roll pin really easily, but you want to make sure that you're getting it down far enough for it to capture the forward assist. With those two parts done, really the only part left we have is the whole barrel assembly. I would say in order to start that the first thing I would do would be to clamp the gas block to the barrel. That's going to help you out with some leverage because this is a very small rounded piece and you're going to have to drive a roll pin through it. If you have a vice with some vice blocks, that'd be a great addition, but not necessary. I would go ahead, install the gas block on here. Kind of get that ... Installing it backwards. Get it lined up really well. There will be some set screws on the bottom that you can then install and that'll give you a much more kind of a stable platform for the installation of the gas tube. The gas tube's very simple. You're going to insert it and then drive the roll pin through the end of the gas block and the gas tube. Once that's installed, you're going to want to remove the whole gas block with gas tube because installing the barrel into the upper receiver requires the installation of this barrel nut and of course, the gas tube would get in the way. There's a nice indexing point on AR-15 barrels that fit into this little recess in the threading and this would be a great time to mention that we also offer AeroShell grease. Now of course, since this is just going to be kind of a dry fit, we're not going to bother, but you're going to want to apply a little bit of grease here and once we get that fit in place, drop this on top and we can install this barrel nut. That's where the other end of your armorers wrench is going to come in. You can see it has these teeth on the side. That's to fit these holes because you're going to want to torque this down. Now the torque range on a barrel nut for an AR-15 is between like 30 and 80 pounds. It's a giant range. Honestly, I frequently skip using the torque wrench. I go until it's tight, make sure everything lines up after that, and I'm good to go, but I would certainly suggest for everybody else, for safety reasons, use the torque wrench. 30 to 80 pounds, you're good to go. Once this is torqued down and you have it lined up to where you can get all the way through this nut into the receiver, you're going to re-install the gas block with the gas tube attached. Slide into place, go ahead and tighten that down. Then basically on a free float hanger like this, the only thing left you have to do, take your free float hand guard, put it down over top, and thread that onto the outside of the barrel nut. I said that's the last thing, but I guess there is one more thing. You're going to take your muzzle device, whatever you decide to use. You may even have an unthreaded barrel, we offer those for sale as well, but you're going to have that, you're going to put that on, put this on. It has flat spots on most muzzle devices so that you can get a wrench. Another use for the armorers wrench. It actually has the squares that you can use to put on there and tighten that down. Again, make sure you get it tight and then you're going to want to line up the gas vents like on top of here where they're appropriate. In this case, you want all these vents to face up and the flat spot, the closed spot, to face down. Once that's done, you're pretty much done with assembling the lower. Obviously, we have bolt carrier groups and charging handles that will insert in, but that's part of normal disassembly. It's not really part of the build. Once you have this all completely built together, you're going to end up with something, not quite necessarily as pretty as this, but- It's all the same components. Yeah, it's pretty much all the same, isn't it? You're going to end up with this. Again, you can see we have the dust cover and the forward assist installed and then the muzzle device. If you can see under the hand guard, you have the gas block with the gas tube coming back and coming pass and through those holes in the barrel nut. Then from there, I always like to do this upside down. You can install your charging handle and bolt carrier group. We have a couple of different options for charging handles and bolt carrier groups as well. This looks like it's our standard charging handle, but we do have one with an extended latch. Gives you a little bit more ease when you're trying to get that open and then we have several bolt carrier groups, including one of my favorite. This is a nickel boron coated Anderson manufactured bolt carrier group. We carry bolt carrier groups in 556223 as well as 762 by 39 and hopefully maybe some more options to match our new barrel options coming soon. We have tons of barrel options, tons of parts kits, and bolt carrier groups. We have amazing variety when it comes to assembling your AR-15 and you can make one customized just for you. Ben, anything else you'd like to wrap up with? Well, what we've done so far. Complete lower. Complete upper. Complete upper. Drop them together, put a magazine in it, a few rounds in the mag, complete AR-15, right? That's right. Ready to go hit the range. Before we close out, we want to show you what drew Dillon away from us. Dillon, Kayla, come on in here. Come on. I'm putting her on the spot, but guys, would you not have stepped away from a video if young Ms. Kayla was calling? Hi, everybody. And Dillon, notice I'm ... Anyway, folks, as always we appreciate your business. Thank you for being with us. Come back every time to see us here at www.ClassicFirearms.com.