Running and Gunning with a "Budget" AR-15

We're going to start with the safety brief and just go over scoring real quick for the stages of the safety brief. We're just going to do the four weapon safety rules. So treat, keep, never be. Treat your weapon as if it were loaded even after you ensure it to be unloaded. Keep your finger straight on the trigger outside the trigger guard until you're ready to fire. Ensure your target is foreground and background and never point your weapon at anything you do not intend to destroy. So as long as you don't break two of those rules, no one will get hurt. If you break one of those rules, you'll just get dropped from the match today. We're doing four different stages. The scoring for each stage is going to change slightly. So we have a USPSA style stage and the scoring is going to be exactly the same. So your best two hits, it's going to be hit factor scoring. You guys are all familiar with that. It's going to be super easy. We have a steal only stage. So that's going to be time only. And if you have a failure to engage deal, as in you hit the time cap and you run out of time, you'll get penalties on top of the time. So time cap two minutes, for example, you missed two pieces of steel, you'll get two minutes plus the penalties for missing the steel. There's one more stage that's paper only, but it's time based. So what that stage is, we're shooting for alphas only and anything outside of the alpha is considered a miss. So you'll have your time as your score and then anything outside the alpha is plus time. And then the final stage is steel and paper. And it's going to be the scoring is going to be very similar to that paper plus time. So you'll shoot on paper, it's only alphas and then you shoot your steel, but there's no time cap. So failure to engage steel and then anything that's not an alpha plus time. So first stage is barricade suicides. So next stage we're doing is called the accelerator. This has steel and steel only ranging from 50 to 100 to 200 and 400 meters. So what we're going to do with the steel is we have a KOL rack that's at 50 meters, just one hit per steel on the KOL rack at a hundred meters we have a head box target. So it's a hostage steel basically. So you see a piece of steel and there's going to be a little guy behind it. You need to from that target on, so from the hundred to 200 and the 400 need two hits per steel. So you need to hit the head box, it'll swing over and then hit it again. Going on from there, we have a reduced season at 200, two hits. And then all the way down at 400 is a full size steel, two hits on that as well. So the two shooting boxes are behind these two cars. So on the gray car here is where you're going to shoot your 200 and 400 meter guy. You can go from anywhere on the car you want. And then the white car is your 50 meter and a hundred meter target. So there's a stick behind the two boxes, that's where you start and you can shoot the targets in any order you want. So there's a time cap of two minutes, and then penalties is going to be 20 seconds per missed steel. Okay. Any questions? I'll go first. All right, so third stage today is called CQB footwork. This is just basically a USPSA stage with rifles, so scoring is the same as the common USPSA scoring. So best two hits. So you can shoot more than two if you so wish. Steel requires one hit per steel. The only thing to note is that steel requires a hit into the blue, not on the red. Let's walk the stage for a little bit and then I'll go first and get into it. So final stage of the day, we're going to do the PID stage. So we're going to start in the context box with the door closed, so it's going to be completely black. So you guys need working flashlights on your gun. And the way we're going to start with the stage is you're going to step into the context box backwards. So facing outside of the box, we'll close the door. We're not going to latch it or anything, but it's going to be completely dark. You will have three different colors here. So we just have a piece of paper, spray painted blue, yellow, and red. So you're going to identify what order your paper is in from left to right. And then from there, you're going to run out of the context box, head over to the VTAC barricade and tank trap. That's about, I don't know, it's probably like 80, 90 meters away. Once you get there, you're going to engage the USPSA target at 50 meters off of the tank trap. So on the tank trap, there's two spray painted red marks. Those are the areas that your hand guard has to touch the tank track. So just off those two legs and on the USPSA target, we're doing 10 rounds. So 10 round group from there. And then from there, you're going to move over to the VTAC and you're going to remember the order that your paper was in. So if you have blue first, then yellow, then red, that's the order that you engage the steel. So whoever's scoring you, they're going to set the order of the paper in there for you. So if you shoot the steel out of order, it's going to be considered a miss. And then also the VTAC barricade, the ports are painted for what port you shoot what target out of. So if it's blue, it'll be a blue port, you shoot the blue steel out of it. So the red steel is the KYL rack at 50 meters, we're shooting that again. So there's five shots there. The blue steel is about 160, 170 meters. It's a reduced C zone. We're going to shoot that three times. And then the yellow is the hostage target again. So we're going to shoot the head box of that guy, but we're only shooting him once. The KYL five times, there's five pieces of steel there, the blue three times and the yellow once. Standby. Red, yellow, blue. Ready. Go. Red, yellow, blue. All right, you guys have fun. It was awesome. All right. So we did a just a practical carbine match. And what the idea of this match is, is just kind of flexing the capabilities of that like general purpose rifle, the rifle that most people own that 14, five, 16 inch gun. So we shot out the 400 meters, it's about generally the max effective range with these guns if you're not shooting match ammo. And then we did even some USPSA style shooting. So like kind of CQB ish type stuff. So the way we are scoring this match is your lowest lowest points wins. So your position per stage gives you a point. So if you got first, you got one point, if you got 50, you get five points. So I had five points overall. So I came in second one, first and the other three, Brantley had seven points. Then Alex had 14, Justin 15, and Chris 19. Practical carbine has a lot to do with positional shooting, and then shooting with a little bit of elevated heart rate. That's kind of part of the focus today. Shooting out the distance, shooting position, shooting with a little bit of heart rate, and then having some little bit of technical movement too. The topic of budget guns is definitely an opinionated topic, and it's a topic that is discussed quite a bit in this industry. And when I've come down to picking out a budget gun, I wanted to find the term budget a little bit more precisely. So generally, what people think of when they think of a budget gun is they try to try to get a gun as cheap as possible. And that is still the premise with this gun. However, like I said, we're gonna be a little bit more precise with what I'm doing with the budget. So in this case, I want to be able to achieve a capability with the budget that I have in going as cheap as I possibly can. Now that capability is really four different things. First thing I want to be able to do with this gun is be able to train with it. Now if that's all you want to do with your gun, you can go really, really cheap. You can get a PSA blim rifle, throw a primary arms red dot on it, get a sling, and you'll probably be around 550 bucks. However, I want to do a little bit more with this gun. So the next thing I want to be able to do with this gun is be able to compete with it. So compete just like we just did today, shoot a practical carbine match, go out and shoot tactical games, something like that, and I want to be competitive. So that means that this gun needs to be somewhat of a high performer. Now there are cheap guns that can perform pretty well, but that's where the other two points are gonna come into play. But the next capability I want to be able to achieve with this gun is I want it to be able to be a practical use gun. So I want this gun to be able to be used for home defense, self-defense, to be able to defend life, extend liberty, that sort of thing. So that's why I have a flashlight with a cover on it and that sort of thing. Now the final capability I want out of this gun is longevity. I want this gun to last at least two maintenance cycles. So that's generally 10,000 to 12,000 rounds. So that means I really can't risk buying a cheap gun like a Blem PSA or an Anderson or something like that. Now those guns may last that long, but I don't want to risk it because I have these other capabilities that I really want to be able to get to and I'm gonna actually be relying on this gun. So with this gun, we're gonna do a full breakdown of this gun over on the Armory channel. So if you go check out our Armory YouTube channel, you'll see a full breakdown of this gun. But just to go over it real quick with you guys, because obviously, as you can see, this probably isn't the cheapest gun you can get out there, but it is pretty cheap. This rifle right here, built, painted, even with the tape, is 900 bucks. With the optic and the light, plus the gun itself, we're right at $1,500 and that's including the sling and everything else. So you're looking at a $1,500 gun, painted with tape, light, optic, sling, the whole nine yards. For the gun itself, just a brief description of this guy. We have a 14.8 inch barrel that's pin and bolt with an A2, gets me to 16 inches. I have an H2 buffer in here and I have a Schmidt 2 stage trigger with our lower parts kit. So the idea with this gun, when it comes down to the budget side of things, is I wanted to sacrifice some specific things, and this is definitely where the opinionated side of the conversation comes into play, so I can spend money on other areas because of those capabilities that I mentioned earlier. So with me wanting the gun to last for 12,000 rounds, I need to spend money on the heart of the gun and have good quality parts there. So Cynic's barrel, KAK Mil-Spec C158 bolt carrier with an H2 buffer, however I have Mil-Spec furniture and obviously that works fine. As you guys see, I was able to compete and be very competitive with this rifle. So like I said, if you guys want a full breakdown of this gun, go ahead and check out the Armory YouTube channel.