Tailor-Made ARs: Part III
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Welcome to the third and final part of our Tailor-Made ARs series, a conceptual approach to building task-focused, performance-driven rifles for emergency preparedness. Several RECOIL OFFGRID writers will each take a unique path to designing an idealized AR for survival and crisis response. We’ll examine how each weapon is tailored to the user, and how it can be creatively adapted to a multitude of dicey situations. We hope these builds reinforce the importance of choosing every component wisely with versatility in mind.
When it comes to survival tools, there’s an old saying that “two is one and one is none.” The intent of this saying is to reinforce the importance of redundancy — if item A breaks or is lost, you still have item B. However, this logic also applies to diversifying the capabilities of your gear. To illustrate the point, let’s look at one of the most critical tools of all: a knife.
You’ve probably already incorporated two knives into your survival kit, but it’s unlikely that they’re two identical knives. One may be a midsized fixed blade, highly durable and capable of heavy-duty chopping. Perhaps it’s a machete or an ax. The other is likely a smaller blade with a more precise edge that’s ideal for shaving tinder or skinning game; it could be a folding knife or a small fixed blade worn on a neck lanyard. Although there’s substantial overlap between the capabilities of these two tools, there are also tasks that each excels at. In addition to providing redundancy, they complement each other.
By this point, you should realize the same philosophy applies to other survival tools, including firearms. So, when the subject of building an ideal survival rifle came up, it led me to the realization that it’s possible the ideal survival rifle isn’t one rifle. I’d argue that it’s two.
Interchangeable Uppers vs. Complete Rifles
In the beginning, I decided to start with my tried-and true 11.5-inch short-barreled rifle (SBR) and simply build a second upper receiver for it. After giving
