1/4/17

The AR-15 Build: Charging Handle, Safety Selector, Dust Cover, and goodies!

Brownells keeps on teasing me with all these sales, and I'm ashamed to admit that it's working on me. Their latest sale was $15 off of $100, which is even better than the previous $10 off of $75!

This time I bought the BCM charging handle, Seekins safety selector, Tapco stock wrench, Strike Industries dust cover, and a chamber flag.

parts photos

BCM Gunfighter Charging Handle MOD 5 (small):
I am not only building this AR-15 to be practical, but to also be fun. I'm sure that a normal charging handle would work just fine, but the BCM version is cooler. It may also help my street cred when I see other oper8orz at the range.


I decided to go with the MOD 5 because of size and weight. I don't envision myself needing a huge charging handle latch, and because this latch is physically smaller than the others, there will be some minuscule weight savings over the other versions which I will gladly take.

Seekins Precision Ambidextrous Safety Selector Kit:
Again, a stock safety isn't cool, and I want to be cool. I couldn't find any hard data on weight, but the Seekins safety levers seem to be made of aluminum that's been milled out on the back to reduce weight.


This particular safety is interesting because it has the option to choose from a 90 degree throw and a shorter 60 degree throw which I find very nice. I'll definitely give the short throw a try, but if I don't like it, I can just swap back to the regular 90 degrees. The price on this ambi safety is also very attractive, even without the Brownells discount.

Strike Industries Enhanced Ultimate Dust Cover:
As the theme of this post goes, standard dust covers aren't cool, and this replacement is cool. Besides that, I wanted to keep the weight down on this build where I can, and this seemed like a good place to save some weight without breaking the bank. I believe that V Seven also makes a light weight aluminum cover, but it's to my understanding that the polymer SI cover is even lighter.


The dust cover comes in black and FDE, as well as a few different styles, but I just went with the regular back. Maybe I should have gone with the version with cuts in it for added weight savings though..

TAPCO AR Stock Wrench - Gen 2 Enhanced:
I needed a wrench for the castle nut. I also don't need a regular barrel nut wrench because the handguard I'm looking at uses a proprietary barrel nut, so I didn't need a full armorers wrench. This does have a slot for a muzzle device though, and that's a feature that will come in handy too.


It's also very cheap.

Chamber Flag:
With the above four items, I was just under the $100 I needed to redeem the coupon code. This chamber flag got me right up to $100.30, which is close enough for me! Because these are dollar amount discounts instead of percentages, they are the most effective at the given limit. This means that a $15 discount at $100 is more effective than the same discount at $200 or any amount higher than $100.


It's not like I won't use it either. I was thinking of making one with my 3D printer, but I needed to reach $100 for the discount to be applied, so I bought this instead.


I don't know how I forgot about the ambi safety in my original parts list, so I'll be adding it in now along with the chamber flag.


Total cost to date: $472.74
Estimated cost remaining: $1,533.83

Estimated Grand Total: $2,006.57
Again, you can see that I went over my $2000 budget by just a hair. I'll keep hunting for deals and discounts wherever I can, and I'll get the price back down where it should be.

'Till next time.


-AA
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