Is a PSA AR a serviceable rifle? Are they know to be reliable?
Because a 350 dollar AR is pretty attractive.
A 350 dollar AR that requires a few simple mods is an unreliable rife.
Any experiences?
The cheap PSA's are a solid entry level AR. It won't be amazing, but it'll be reliable, if a over-gassed, and it'll shoot ball ammo to about 4 ish MOA. The barrel's nitrided on the freedom series not chrome lined, and not the FN Cold Hammer Forged barrels of their more expensive stuff.
PSA uses a Carpenter 158 bolt and a full inspected M16 bolt carrier on even their cheap builds, so that's good.
The trigger group will be mil spec ish, and probably a little crunchy, but perfectly serviceable. Plastic mil-spec iish furniture.
From what I've seen, The springs wear out a faster than the really nice brands, and since the tolerances are a little looser the whole gun will wear out a little faster. I have a freedom series upper I built from a kit, and while I don't shoot it as much as my main guns, I can see it wearing a little faster. In real world terms, just going by my estimates of wear, I'd expect one of the $350 Freedom series guns to need you to look at the extractor spring and extractor buffer, the buffer spring, and maybe the ejector spring and bolt gas rings somewhere around 5000-7000 rds. They run them over gassed for reliability with all kinds of cheap ammo, so it's a little harder on the bolt parts. I'd also want to keep an eye on the bolt carrier key for the same overgassing reason
But it'll be a serviceable, if plain jane, gun up to then, and those parts are pretty trivial to replace if they do go bad.
If it's all you can afford for HD, or you want a spare gun, I wouldn't hesitate to grab one. If you think you are going to get in to serious shooting (several thousand rounds a year, matches, carbine courses, stuff like that) I would say you'd be better served getting a nicer gun. Both because the gun will last longer and be more pleasant to shoot, and because you'll end up swapping a lot of parts off that freedom series M4 to bring it up to modern fighting rifle snuff, so you won't save that much in the end.