AR-ts & Crafts: Painting and Staining

With this installment on the blog, we return to the earliest days of Norseman Creative, where I primarily wrote about the firearms I had experience with. Remember! My second novel, Retrograde Absolution, is out for purchase! Just in time for the holidays! I do have a limited stock of my first novel, Frozen Reaction, in the blog’s shop page available for purchase with a signature. Otherwise it too can be found on Amazon or wherever you get your books. Anyway, enjoy this esoteric deep dive into a rifle I really didn’t need to fiddle with but did so anyway.

A quick perusal of my blog or either of my two novels will easily reveal that I am a big gun nerd. I have had a fascination with firearms and their skillful use since I was young. The history behind various firearms, the engineering behind them, and the use of firearms has always fascinated me. This fascination grew from a love of hunting, and led to competitive marksmanship, amateur gun-smithing, and firearm collecting.

It has also led me to become bored with AR-15s. Yes, America’s most popular, most controversial rifle is boring. Especially a plain old, boring black rifle that looks just like the same rifle every other goober has in their safe. Several years ago, I assembled an AR-15 that looked just like everyone else’s, and it finally got to me during a weekend trip to the shooting range.

I built this rifle using my 2d Lt paychecks way back when I used to live in Texas. When I first finished it, it had a polymer Magpul handguard, simple iron sights, a flashlight on the left side of the handguard, and a padded sling. It was simple but effective, and I used it in several action carbine stages at the San Angelo Gun Club.

Over time, I decided that the rifle needed some changes. First, the addition of an affordable red dot optic from Vortex, the SPARC AR. I was drawn to this particular optic because it ran on AAA batteries, and in the hypothetical scenario where the red dot ran out of juice, I thought it would be easier to source AAA batteries than the button style batteries than were used by the Aimpoint PRO mounted on my first AR-15. Next, I replaced the polymer Magpul handguard with an aluminum, two-piece rail from Midwest Industries. Finally, I switched to a sling with a thinner pad and a Quick Detach mechanism.

This configuration was fine, for a time. I shot the rifle well, but I have to admit that the only real performance upgrade was the optic. Through many a range trip, the rifle punched consistent holes in paper, and I was pretty much happy with it.

But then people started asking me if I owned Night Vision Goggles, because I seemed like the type of person who would own Night Vision Goggles. Even my wife was surprised that I didn’t have any Night Vision Goggles when she asked me if I had a pair of Night Vision Goggles, even though we’ve been together for five years and she hadn’t seen me use any Night Vision Goggles. It made me think I should get some Night Vision Goggles, and that if I was to get Night Vision Goggles, I would need to set up my AR-15 for use with Night Vision Goggles.

The thing is, NVGs are very expensive, and I have bills to pay. In addition to the NVGs, I would need some sort of headgear to wear that can mount the NVGs, then a laser aiming module to help aim while using the NVGs, next a infrared illuminator so I can see what I am doing when its really dark, and then finally all the knick-knack pieces and mounts that go into making that whole system function. With the two-piece, drop-in handguard, my rifle wasn’t really set up use under night vision. I needed to make some changes to the rifle in order for it work under NVGs, especially a new rail and a new optic that would work with NVGs and a laser. Therefore, I had my excuse to start tinkering with a fine rifle again.

First thing first though, I had to finish my gunsmith bench, which I built with the help of two friends way back in 2021. The bench was built using wood from an old pallet out of a shipment of clay pigeons to a gun club I belonged to back then, and the wood had yet to be stained and a vice grip installed. One weekend while I waited for rifle parts to arrive in the mail, I got to business sanding, staining, and augmenting my homemade gunsmith bench.

After the bench was done, I had to remove the rifle’s old handguard and optic. That step was easy enough, but then I had to remove pieces of the rifle to fit the free-floating handguard that I bought to replace the old one. That turned out to be more challenging than I thought, and my use of a Dremel and a pair of tin snips was less than elegant. After a couple hours of sweating in the humidity, cussing at inanimate objects, and pounding various parts of my rifle with suboptimal tools for pounding, I finally got my handguard on. Crooked.

After putting the new optic and magnifier on, I realized that the handguard hadn’t lined up quite right when I was torqueing down the screws. Rather than fix it right then and there, I put the rifle back in my safe and went for a walk with my dogs. The rifle sat in my safe until the following weekend, when I hauled it back out on Friday night and re-set the handguard to align properly. Now satisfied, I went to the shooting range first thing Saturday morning while Jenny was out scuba diving.

Unfortunately, I find myself at a third duty station in a row where finding a good rifle range is out of the question. I went to a very nice indoor range, where the maximum distance was only 25 meters, hardly a good measure of a rifle’s accuracy. The rifle printed good enough groups for a hasty zero, and I spent the remainder of my ammunition getting acquainted with the EOTech XPS-3 and G45 magnifier.

Through my military service in the Air Force, I have grown more accustomed to traditional red dot optics like the Aimpoint M68 Close Combat Optic found on a USAF issued M4 Carbine or the Vortex SPARC AR that was previously on this rifle. I did find that I needed a bit of practice with the EOTech before it felt natural, but once I figured it out, I really liked it. A criticism I have of this particular unit is that the adjustment screws to zero the optic did not have a very positive click on the left/right screw, even though there was a positive click on the up/down screw. Even so, I got the optic zeroed quickly.

While I was at the shooting range, I decided that I was bored with a black and grey rifle, and my only recourse was to paint my rifle. After I had finished punching holes into paper, I went out to procure some camouflage spray paint.

I bought three different colors of camouflage spray paint; green, tan, and brown. For a previous rifle that I spray-painted, I went with a tan-dominant color scheme since I was headed to West-Texas, land of brown grass. This time, I decided I wanted a green dominant spray paint pattern since I live in Hawaii, land of Aloha and lush green jungles.

The first step I took was to remove the EOTech and Magnifier, and to take out the bolt carrier group and charging handle. Next, I took off the stock and removed the rubber recoil pad, and then taped up the muzzle, forward assist, trigger, front sight, and the charging handle slot in the receiver. Finally, I took an old, green Magpul P-Mag and removed the spring and follower before putting the shell back into the magazine well of my rifle.

Using the same cardboard box I used to stain the gunsmith bench, I sprayed both the rifle and the stock with the green spray paint. I have always been partial to the expedient spray paint camouflages where the painter paints a rifle a solid color, and then uses different colors in stripes to create a camouflage pattern. Initially that was the plan, but after I finished spray painting my rifle green, I decided I liked it that way for now. It reminded me of the little green army men I used to play with, so a solid green the rifle will stay for now.

I also chose not to paint the optic or the light at this time. I may choose to do so in the future, but for now I am not entirely sure that I am sold on the EOTech and may want to re-sell it or put it on a different rifle later. So the optic and the light remain in the current color, black, until I decide I love the EOTech. I know I want to replace the light, but that’s for a different time all together.

After I was done painting and the paint had dried enough, I put the rifle back in the safe to cure. Even though the rifle was done to my satisfaction, my creative juices were still flowing. Luckily for me, I had a bunch of rifle magazines lying about, unpainted. Fresh canvasses to experiment on. Digging through my equipment bins, I came up with a couple extra steel canvasses, a few old aluminum canvasses, some P-Canvasses, an old Troy BattleCanvass, and a SureFire 60 round quad-stack canvass.

I taped up the feed lips and openings on all the metal magazines to keep paint off the followers and out of the springs. For the Magpul magazines, I simply removed the magazine baseplate and pulled out the spring and follower. For all the magazines, I taped off the top third of the magazine, where it inserts into the rifle and where I put my inventory markings so they wouldn’t get all fouled up.

For the first batch of magazines, I painted them all a solid brown, simply because I hadn’t painted anything brown yet. After I painted both sides of each magazine, I set the steel magazine aside to let it just be a brown magazine.

Next, I took the three remaining magazines and set up three different camo patterns. One would be a simple stripe where I would next spray different color stripes of spray paint across the magazine. The next would be a “tiger-stripe” inspired magazine where I would tape off different shapes to get the desired pattern. The last one would be a “chip” pattern where I would tape off different shaped blotches and spray over them to get my desired pattern.

I finished these four magazines and decided to continue experimenting. I didn’t really like the chip pattern, but the spray pattern and tiger-stripe turned out all right. I also decided to go for a more green-dominant color scheme as well. Finally, I found a can of grey spray paint we used on my wife’s car to patch a ding and a can of brighter, green spray paint we used to paint our mailbox. I figured I would use them to see what those looked like as well.

I repeated the process from the first group of magazines on these magazines and liked the results. I made one error, however. On the first group of magazines, I removed all the tape about thirty minutes after finishing all the spray painting. On the second group of magazines, I finished spray painting and then went to watch TV with my wife and then went to bed. Because I didn’t take the tape off right away, the second batch of magazines had their paint cure a bit more, and the tape was harder to remove, and little blue tape fibers are still present in some instances. Nothing a little use or maybe just some sand paper wouldn’t fix, but annoying.

My favorite results were the solid green magazine, which ended up looking like the magazine from a G.I. Joe rifle, and the basic stripes.

All in all, this was a fun, easy project to scratch a creative itch. The best thing about it was that it was cheap, especially considering that all these magazines were purchased a long time ago, and in bulk. I highly recommend painting whatever rifle or accessory you have as a fun and easy way to personalize your equipment.