Aero M4E1
Initial Draft: January 23, 2025

Caliber: 5.56x45
Barrel Length: 20"
Weight: I need to check
Production Date: December 24, 2022
Price Paid: $IDon'tRemember

In 2022, a buddy of mine had come back home after serving in the Marines. We always shot stuff as kids, airsoft guns and pellet guns were pretty common to mess about with, and he alongside another friend were talking about how building a rifle would be cool. I was already reading into building myself an AR and I had been working overtime to buy people Christmas gifts so I piched a fun little idea: How about we all build ARs together? I bought their complete lower assemblies and magazines, they would just have to get uppers and ammo. They thought it sounded cool too so we did just that.

While my buddies just wanted 16" rifles with Magpul furniture, I wanted to get a little goofy. My list of requirements went something like this:
I want A1 furniture and a 20" barrel with a pinned FSB on a fairly modern receiver set.
Why? I honestly couldn't tell you any more, nowadays we just call this the "cursed AR" because it looks damn goofy (but works damn well!).

On a trip to the local gun shop I got each of my buddies the receivers they wanted, just plain mil-spec Anderson lowers. I wanted something a bit "special" so I got myself an Aero M4E1 lower, all fancy with the flared magwell and different safety selector markings. Every other part of my gun was bought online: A CMMG lower build kit, a SOLGW BCG, an Aero rifle-length buffer kit, a BCM upper, an Aero 20" barrel, some generic rifle-length gas tube, a Brownell's Retro-series brown A1 stock and handguard set, a Brownell's Retro-series AR10 grip, and six PSA (D&H) steel magazines.

Building the rifle was damn simple. The hardest part of the day was actually getting my buddies over, all the stuff was at my house and we picked the worst day of the winter (a complete white-out blizzard) to do things. I took 40 minutes to get my friend that lived ten minutes away, the guy driving himself took something like half an hour for what's normally a 15-minute drive. I'm glad the power didn't go out on us!

As things stand, I shoot the rifle pretty regularly. It's damn accurate out to 200 yards on irons, there really isn't any kick, and sure it goes "sproing" but what AR doesn't? Because of that, it goes everywhere. The Friday after every Christmas and the weekend of/around the Fourth of July is always a shoot day, we get together and I put six magazines through the rifle myself (let alone any more that others want to run), and I take the thing to the public range every other month to run fifty rounds. It has yet to have a single malfunction, sometimes you have to slap the steel mags into the well a little hard but the thing just runs without a hiccup. If I had to take a guess, at the moment of initally writing this page I'd say I've personally shot a little over 1,500 rounds through the thing?

I have no plans for the rifle at this moment. It just works. I keep six loaded magazines + 500 loose rounds for the thing at all times, it's something I can pick up that I know will go "bang" whenever I want a fun trip to the flat range. Maybe some day I'll consider putting an optic on it instead of running flat irons? I just haven't felt too much of a desire yet, I've started working on setting up a second (more modern) rifle for things like scopes and flashlights anyways.