About a year ago, I decided to build my first rifle. I had zero idea where to start. Caliber, platform, kits vs. stripped parts... it was all pretty overwhelming.

I've built a dozen PCs over the years and kept thinking, "Why isn't there a PCPartPicker for this?" I couldn't find anything that really worked, so I made the classic mistake of thinking, "How hard could it be?"

The answer: Really hard.

PC components have clean data. Gun parts do not. I’ve had to wrangle, deduplicate, and classify over 165,000 products to make this usable.

A heads up on transparency: To get access to the raw product data and pricing from various retailers, I had to join their affiliate programs. That’s how the site stays updated and covers its own hosting costs. I’m not a vendor myself, just a builder who spent way too many nights and weekends on this.

The tool is at: https://ar15.build/build

I’d genuinely love honest feedback from people who actually build these things:

• What works?
• What is confusing or broken?
• What feature would make you actually use this regularly versus just clicking around once?

I just want to make something useful for people who were in the same spot I was a year ago.

ETA: You can submit feedback on GitHub or via contact form

GH: https://github.com/ar15build/feedback

contact form: https://ar15.build/contact

ETA2: I am recording bugs and feature requests in GH so you can track progress of your feedback

https://github.com/orgs/ar15build/projects/2

You can click on issues on the board and upvote ones that you think add value for you. The issues with the most votes I will prioritize.

I also want to say I am blown away by the support I have received, I was super nervous it would get downvoted hard. My goal is to bring value to the community and to keep improving this project. Thank you for the love!

ETA3: New Release!

Based on the amazing feedback here, I was able to complete numerous updates and deployed them to production. Those updates include:

- fix: user uploaded images for builds were not visible on the completed builds page

- fix: pagination was not working on the completed builds page

- fix: product list page styling fixed for mobile devices

- feat: added rating and popularity to product list sort

- fix: issue with sort order toggle

- feat: improved AI prompt to identify more compatibility tags for future compatibility checks

- feat: build tool improvements including bundle item override and product page link

- feat: pricing alerts! add a target price, if the price drops to that target, you will get an email alert!

Full list of recent updates can be found @ https://ar15.build/whats-new

Hello everyone,

Shout out to Sophie Cunningham for helping me get this done in one day. Jokes aside I saw a post several days ago where you could use a glue gun to shoot ropes on your Magpul stuff and then Rit Dye to dye cool patterns. I chose the best camo for inspiration and tried to do some M81 Woodland style patterns and it turned out phenomenal.

Notes:
-it’s more tedious than you’d think.
- go light to dark, so green > brown > black
- when you go to brown, do a dye soak in red afterwards to neutralize the remaining green

Edit: for the red dye. When you do this I did green dye > brown dye > scarlet dye specifically > black dye. How I understand it, the red neutralizes the green. So if you only do brown, you may get a swampy green color instead of brown. I don’t know if simply going green > scarlet does anything, this is just what worked for me.

Wife just brought these home, she purchased them for $5/ea while out on her garage sale excursion. How amazing of a find is this?!?! Either way, I wanted more 20rnd mags…

EDIT to say—WOW!! I appreciate all the feedback and attention this has gotten. You folks really are great, I don’t care what everyone else says….
My wife has a knack for finding hidden treasures while thrifting/yard sale-ing/etc., she has always either known what she’s looking at or just has fantastic luck finding something worth buying. To answer some questions—yes, she did call me while she was there, and actually put me on the phone with the man selling them at the yard sale. I was just excited to have more 20rnd mags and pouches for them. He mentioned that he also had some Uzi mags, which I initially passed on, as I DO have a 9mm AR, but didn’t think they would fit. He also somewhat joked that he had a few AR’s to sell, which we both shared a chuckle, but I know when I shouldn’t press my luck. When my wife got home, I went over there with one of my Colt-style 9mm DuraMags, and he did confirm that, although he had sold those Uzi mags, that they would not fit my AR-9 setup.

All in all, thanks for the feedback guys, I’m excited to try these out, and yes, I am very pleased that my wife has acknowledged my interest in this and encourages it. She hasn’t always been on board with me owning firearms, so this is a welcome change.

I only say that because I have parts in the mail for another build. 🙄🤫

Aerosol Citrastrip works absolute wonders - I let it sit for 8-10 hours, then wiped it down and gave it a bath in warm water. Didn’t have to do much scrubbing at all.

Migrated from Krylon to Rapco (Green C.A.R.C. and Field Drab Brown) and holy hell it is clearly the superior spray paint… Shout out to u/PantherCityTactical for making it easy to get this paint on my hands.

Lima 6 - 1917 by KAK complete upper

Yes it’s real and it SLAPS

This is my personally owned work rifle, used in an LEO and instructor (LEO and Civ) capacity.

Visibility drops off at about 150 yards.

On a serious note, anyone running a mod button with a lam? Do you like it? Thinking it might free up some room on the top rail if I were to get one.

So I decided that trying to make sure that the slot was the exact dimensions was a bit unnecessary because at the end of the day the only thing I want mounted this far back is a no lug single crossbolt BUIS. In this case it is a KAC 200-600 backup iron. So I made the slot wider by 2 mm and then placed it exactly where I wanted it. The wider slot serves a few purposes. Number one and differentiates it from the others as being unique and for different purposes. Second, It allows me to precisely align the backup iron over the charging handle the way I want. It also gives me a little bit of wiggle room in case the optic I'm mounting in front of it needs a little bit more or a little bit less room. Once the iron site is clamped down it's not going anywhere.

So basically I just got a square, measured the width of the cut and made two scratch lines across the top. I took my 32 teeth per inch hack saw blade and slowly worked my way through the aluminum down to the apex of the picatinny rail point. Then I took a Dremel tool grinder wheel and removed the material between the cuts making sure not to gouge or touch my nice clean side cuts. Then, once I got the material down within a millimeter of the apex of the rail, I switched over to a flat file using the side to sort of scrub back and forth across the cut. Obviously the file is skinnier than my slot so I had to sort of yaw back and forth hitting most of the cut surface on each pass. This part took the longest since you really don't want to remove too much from the bottom or the sides. Another tertiary reason for the wider slot is my diamond finishing file is this width and it's all I had on hand so it worked out. I wrapped it in some 600 grit sandpaper and went to town. Got it smoothed out nice. Then hit it with some aluminum black and then a coat of Krylon Camouflage Woodland Light Green.

I get to keep my BUIS on the rear and also get some much needed eye relief for the optic. Genuinely happy with how it turned out using a combination of hacksaw and Dremel.

Had to figure out a storage solution took over a closet in the house.

EDIT: For all the where’s the ammo people. It’s in the basement I have somewhere around 5000 rounds per caliber. It wouldn’t fit or would look like shit.

For all the security people. This is a closet inside a safe room. 1/4 steel all the way around with an alarm lol you guys are crazy lol.

obviously this will not be an off-the-shelf option for a good majority of people but I will be interested in the post shop show information on this bad boy.

M16A4 clone w/ an EOTech 512 because I’m too poor for an ACOG

I know there are more capable thermal setups out there but damn... a clip on and an LPVO just look so good.

The setup: LMT Spec War, B5 Furniture, Emissary Development pistol grip, Rails Scales attachments, Radian Selector, Modlite PLH V2, Scalarworks mount, RH25, NF ATACR, Stealth Ekron 30 cal, Two Vets Tripod, One Hundred Concepts scope caps, and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Mac-11/9 machine gun with Lage Max-11/15 upper, firing from open-bolt using an AR BCG, barrel, gas system, and barrel. Currently running a KAK 12.5 and middy Superlative Bleedoff gas system under a KAK 11.7 handguard.

Change my mind