but its also not that cheap if you are doing the full conversion. at the moment, u will pay $300-330 for the saiga, $100 for the Kvar furniture (200-250 if u want a folder), 30 for the trigger, 80 for the dinzag bolt on lower handguard retainer, 30 for the upper gas tube with handguard retainer, 30 for the bullet guide, 30 dollars to crown/thread the barrel (a loose figure, in reality u need to own the tools >$30 or do the renting process at dinzag or know someone that will do it and most likely charge >$30), $10-20 for the muzzle break, another $10 if you want a standard AK trigger guard, and lastly 30 for the requisite 2 high cap magazines that you'll want to replace.
So the cheapest you could get a fully converted ak-103 style saiga with a slant break would be $610 (assuming you know someone that will thread and crown for free and assuming you reuse your trigger guard
). $600 for everything else but no muzzle break or threading. you could spend up to $860 doing a full conversion on a folder or $710 on a fixed stock with kvar furniture and, say, $60 towards solving the matter of threading.
the saiga deal in the OP isnt that great considering if you want the standard AK furniture, you end up paying 550 for that gun + 60 kvar hand guard furniture + 80 dinzag bolt on + 30 gas tube with retainer = $720 for what u could have had for $600+labor and you still wouldnt have the threading or muzzlebreak (the "full conversion") after all that $$$.
if all you wanted was a basic converted saiga then u could do it for 300 (probably a good deal at the moment) + 60 (furniture) + 30 (trigger) + 30 (bullet guide) = $420 and u'd reuse your saiga trigger guard. you could maybe knock it down to $390 if u use the cheapest furniture you can find.
with the prices as they are, I'd do it myself for a basic Saiga. by my math, $550 is over priced by ~30% over a basic $390-$420 conversion. On the other hand, for a full conversion with a muzzlebreak, I'd just buy a nice finished $700-800 dollar rifle, because the markup drops to 12% (from spending $700 + labor doing it yourself) and all the labor that would have gone into selecting parts and prepping your receiver is probably worth $100, and you may not really be paying anything for labor on a complete full conversion package if you were going to end up spending $100 on tools for rivets, threading, or dremel, or paying a gunsmith for any part of the tasks on your own conversion.
If you can easily thread the barrel and place rivets, then a do it yourself full conversion makes sense, because in a decent workshop a lot of this can be done cheap. if u punch out the front sight block u can use cheaper hand guard retainers too.
maybe theres a cheaper route than using dinzag, tapco, and kvar that im not taking into account, and as far as I know Saigas are pretty much all $330 or more out the door now. I didn't even factor in shipping and potential transfer fees for the gun and parts. the prices im quoting may seem high, but it may represent a realistic ballpark.
If i wanted a classic looking configuration, I'd rather pay a little less and get a vector, lancaster, romy g-code, wasr-10/63, or century yugo M70. I'd do a basic conversion with tapco stuff for the cheapest possible high-quality AK action or maybe buy an unconverted saiga. I wouldn't bother putting the time and money into doing a full conversion myself because by the end i could have paid the same amount or maybe 10% more and invested none of my own labor or time. but its really not that big of a project if you have the experience and tools, and by all means, if it sounds fun, and you dont mind spending >$600, then have at the full do-it-yourself AK-103 conversion. If you ignore the matter of threading and having a muzzle break, and own a dremel, its pretty simple and probably the best AK you can get at the $600 price point.
sorry, i know this is way more than u asked for.
