I disagree. You must be buying your parts at the wrong place.
“You must be buying your parts at the wrong place.”
Maybe so. Go to Ar-15.com. The consensus seems to be that building is great but in the end, using similar quality parts, that a build is no cheaper than to buy a complete rifle. There is very little labor involved when buying a complete rifle from any of the major manufacturers. A well trained ‘smith probably takes, what? 30 minutes? an hour? to assemble an AR from scratch. And with the savings in quanity on parts, in the end, it’ll come out about the same.
But, either way, if you can buy all you are comfortable in buying. I have 2. Traded for one and paid not much, 699.00, for a nice Sabre Defense carbine after the last panic subsided.