Buying an Anderson lower? Read this.

[gregkl]

I have built two out of five lowers and no issues yet. I'm looking at one right now and the threads stop about 1/16" shy of where the hole terminates in the fire control pocket.

 

[1DOWN4UP]

Armalite has em for $179.00 plus ship,.........

 

[1DOWN4UP]

Got a Colt on GB for $379.00 and rising right now.

 

[seedubs1]

Aero Precision lowers can frequently be found for $50 and under. I got my last batch from them for $45 each after all expenses (transfer, shipping, etc...). PSA lowers are also known to be better than Anderson's.

What makes them better? Better machining makes them better. You'll hear "they all come from the same forging houses" a lot. That's correct, but someone has to do the final machining on those forgings. Anderson does their own machining and lots of them have tooling marks, off center or mis-aligned holes, threads not tapped to the correct depths, and just general bottom of the barrel machining. Now.....here's the good part.....if you know what you're doing, you can fix the issues commonly seen on Anderson and other cheap lowers most of the time. And if it's not salvageable, you can send it back to Anderson and they'll fix it.

But personally, I'll spring the extra $10-15 for a much higher quality upper. In the end, $10-15 is a drop in the bucket in the AR world. I bought a few Anderson lowers a while back. They looked awful. Gouges and other tool marks, anodizing was not uniform and messed up some of the roll pin holes and other functional areas. Never again. Learned my lesson. They went together after I polished those turds up and ran fine, but it wasn't worth the hassle when I can get a much nicer lower for just a few bucks more.

Who has a better deal? Which one is better and what makes it better?

Yup. You pay for a higher level of confidence. But that never is 100%. They all put out turds. Some just much more frequently than others.

Just a note......I had a new in the box Rock that I tried to assemble a few days ago......It was a mess.
Just took some time/effort to clean up a few areas but I will say they all screw up now and then.

 

[jgressley2003]

Can I ask where you are buying them that cheap seedubs? I looked on Aero's website and Gunbroker, all I see is $90 range.