Strange AR-15 build and some gun price/rarity history

There's quite a story behind the "Stop Sign" SGW lowers. As you already know, they're the predecessor to Olympic Arms. The true early SGW stuff is quite good quality and they're best known for their barrel quality, at least at the time. I have an early SGW built as an A2 and it's a very reliable rifle, although I now prefer to shoot with scopes... age, doncha know.

A barrel with the FSB installed would pretty much be plug n play if you would like to use that upper.
https://www.aeroprecisionusa.com/556-20-fsb-rifle-cmv-barrel

I'd hang onto it in any case.
Those uppers are getting hard to come by and that would make a pretty cool rebuild.

These days if you have a solid lower you can just swap on another upper pretty easy.
But then you have two complete uppers and one lower and the next thing you know there's two complete rifles.

I had just bought my first handgun right before the AWB hit, a six shooter.
AR15's didn't interest me much back then.
Pre-ban, post-ban what a bunch of nonsense.
When it finally lifted I still didn't really mess with them much, I had FAL kits to put together so money, tooling and whatnot went to them for a while.
Then the import ban hit and cheap 7.62x51 was a thing of the past.
They just have to suck the fun out of everything.

DustyGmt said:

When I was a kid I remember seeing all the racks upon racks of $99 SKS's, $250 Maadi AK's, $75 91/30's, etc... I wasn't of legal buying age but I couldn't wait to get myself a job and return when it was my time and buy 3 of everything, lol. I also used to circle guns in shotgun news and dream of owning everything in that catalog.

When I first went out after an AR there were the same typical 5 manufacturers on the rack that I'd always seen, the big 5 of that time. Bushmaster, Colt, Stag, Olympic and DPMS. I bought a very simple DPMS Sportical for around $800 while the others were $1000 and up.

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I wish I had bought a bunch of Mosins and AK’s and mausers, but unfortunately I was foolish enough to listen to the old fudds that were telling me they were inaccurate junk that wasn’t worth owning.

I like it.

From the era it was made, there really wasn't a lot of options like today. ( As you all can see )

I'd bet it was a varmint rifle , or a long range target AR. A 24" barrel would squeeze as much velocity as possible ( much like 22" 6.5CM's ) out of the common 55gr bullets.

FWIW... I have a OEM 24" PSA upper in 5.56, I have never seen another. I have never gotten around to shooting it... but it obviously caught my eye way back when.

silicosys4 said:

The muzzle device makes about as much sense as the rest of the gun.

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Gotta remember two things back then:

1) We didn’t know then what we know now as a buying market, so “a little” recoil reduction seemed better than none. Muzzle brakes were hen’s teeth and threaded factory barrels were unicorns. Threaded barrels were rare enough that thread protectors weren’t really a thing yet either. So any brake induced drool among the right market.

2) We were in an era of Magnumitis, so recoil reduction on a 223/5.56 wasn’t really a thing. But we sold brakes like this on “muzzle stabilization,” and contrasted them with the angled compensators of AK’s which “push the muzzle down to compensate for the gross muzzle rise of the extremely dropped stock - but an AR isn’t dropped like that, so you can benefit from 360* stabilization….” It wasn’t ALL BS…

3) The word shared the old school “brakes make rifles too loud to the shooter,” so we sold forward ports based on “pushing blast away from the shooter and partners/spotters”.

The 94-04 A.W. ban.

Hadn't thought of that in many a year.

I also remember the bayonet lug neutered Ak's going CHEAP in 05, since you could now get a full featured one for cheap.

That rifle is so absurd but also so interesting

I'm glad to see what you did with it in the other thread. Golly, I know I've done some stuff when I was young and dumb... And still am