Remington or Armalite Build?

[Kettle93]

Fellow THR-er's,
I'm about to go to school next fall, and I'm gunna go to a gunsmithing school next fall and in the mean time I'd like a bit of a project to give me experience for the field as well as to keep me busy in the mean time. It's basically come down to either doing a super accurate Remington 700 build, what with pillar and glass bedding, free floating, trigger work, you know all the good stuff; or an SPR upgrade to my Armalite M-15 with a WOA SPR rifle length barrel, troy hand guard, and fully MagPul-ed out. As far as being the most useful to me further on down the road, which project should I choose? Thanks!

 

[Z-Michigan]

You would learn far more, both overall and as useful skills, doing the Remington 700 work. Why? Because there is genuine gunsmithing there, things that not many people know how to do properly. Almost any upgrade you might make to an AR15 is easy basement workshop stuff for someone with the right tools and basic mechanical skills. You will be able to learn it at home in a few hours without any trouble, no expert oversight required. I base this on my own personal experience. The only really difficult gunsmithing you can do on an AR15 is advanced match grade work such as truing the receiver, modifying A2 sights for national match competition (like the Compass Lake mod) etc., as well as quality trigger jobs which are mostly pointless given the huge range of options for drop-in aftermarket triggers that are better than any job you could attempt to do on the stock trigger.

 

[helotaxi]

Well, you could custom cut the barrel from a blank, install the barrel extension and time the gas port. That's really the only heavy duty gunsmithing involved in an AR. It also requires a lathe. Beyond that, everything AR-ish is armorer work. Any work worth doing on a Rem 700 is going to require a lathe as well. Triggers are essentially a drop=in affair for them anymore as well. Stock bedding is nothing magical.

I would decide what you want to focus on as a gunsmith and use this project to gain some more in-depth knowledge of the workings of the particular design. Not just how to disassemble and reassmeble it but also what each part does within the mechanism and the principle of operation.

 

[68wj]

I agree with Posts 2 and 3. Rem 700 = Gunsmith, AR type rifle = Armorer.