Lots of mis-information in this thread
WASRs are as bad as AKs get. You may get a good one, you may get a bad one that gives you trouble, and you may get a
bad one that you never push hard enough to fail. Just because a few people have good ones does not make them good guns, just lucky buyers.
Here's how it works:
In order to be sold in the US as a "sporting" rifle, there has to be a certain number of American and foreign parts in the gun. Different model rifles have a different balance of parts.
For the WASR, Romanians disassemble used decomissioned military weapons and ship the parts to the US, sans reciever and usually barrel. Once in the US, the sometimes heavily used parts are put onto a US made reciever with a non chrome lined US made barrel. The problems are that the parts aren't all new, and that they don't always assemble the rifle right, resulting in problems from canted front sight blocks (very common, sometimes you can't zero the rifle it's so crooked) to misfitted actions that don't cycle properly.
There are entire companies who make their money unscrewingup these guns. Rifle Dynamics does quite a bit of it, and they do a damned good job from what I see.
Saigas are a great start for a really nice rifle, but even they can have issues that should be looked over by a professional. Here is where you can buy a nice converted Saiga, by Arsenal I believe. These are real Russian AKs with great barrels:
https://www.k-var.com/shop/home.php?cat=353
Again, some people buy a rifle from a bad builder and it works fine, but some people end up with a nightmare gun built by someone who won't take responsibility for it. It's just $200 more for the Arsenal built Saiga....
