I’m coming up on my 20yr anniversary with the AR this month. I bought a Spanish Mauser at a local gunshow in the fall of ‘99, which was mis-identified as a 7x57. After a week with it at home, I sought help from a local smith who had done some Garand work for my Service Rifle the year before, in hopes to identify the chambering - turned out to be a 308win, rebarreled with a Springfield Dual Groove. I began apprenticing under the smith shortly thereafter; an old school Mauser and Garandsmith who favored the 70 and turned his nose up at 700’s coming into his shop, and who abhorred AR’s. As a Garand builder for Service Rifle competitors at that time, he was seeing a lot of loyal customers turn toward AR’s, and he was too stubborn to welcome the new business, high customer demand and low labor demand as it was. I none-to-subtly suggested he let me take on the AR builds/rebuilds he didn’t want to keep old and draw new customers, and by March I’d swapped time for parts and built my own Service Rifle (to the tune of about $200). Bushmaster A2 clone with a Krieger barrel and their 2 Stage National Match trigger, nothing fancy, but compliant with NRAHP/CMP, and certainly shot smaller at 600yrds than I was capable.

Fast forward to today, I’ve built and rebuilt over 600 AR’s, uppers, and lowers, over 200 from the ground up. I’m much slower in the last ~8yrs than I was in the 2000’s, but I still crank out a dozen or so every year - I’m sitting on 8 uppers and complete rifles in queue at my bench right now.