am I a moron for thinking about this?

[Sergi762]

As a new guy to AK building and a not so rich gun collector I figured I'd pass this by here as y'all know far more than I do. Near as I can tell Romanian made rifles have decent quality parts( read shooting grade not collector grade) but the builds are just bilge. How difficult would it be to remove that god awful Cugir receiver and install a NDS? What tools would I need and would I need to head space the rifle after that? I can already guess I'll need either rivets or find a screw kit to hold it together but what else?
the swap would be done to a WASR 10 rife or the like ..although if I could find a parts kit and the data to prep a US barrel I may just ignore the WASRs entirely... Ahem anyway thank you for your time.

[FunkyPertwee]

If your going to do all that then just buy a kit and build it.

[Schuetzenman]

The biggest deal with the WASR 10 receivers is no dimples. Aside from that it's an AK receiver all be it opened up to double stack by Century gun monkies. The receiver is the weapon, so replacing it with an NDS receiver, (another gun in BATFE's eyes) makes no sense at all to me.

As already suggested, you'd be better off just getting a kit with an original barrel and build that up on the NDS receiver. However, to do a quality rivet build will take hundreds of dollars in equipment unless you can fabricate the tools yourself. It would be more cost effective to simply save your money up and just go buy a quality built AK and be done with it.

Kits aren't $115 for a fixed stock and $225 for an under folder anymore. I built them in that time in the kit world and it was big fun. But when the kits started drying up I sold off my equipment and eventually all my 7.62 AK weapons.

[jojo]

Yep as stated just build you a kit. They can be had on Gunbroker. You can sell the WASR and recoup some of the cost. Get a NDS receiver and have a build party with someone that lives close to you. That's what they used to do about 10-15 years ago.

Like Schuetz said cheap kits are hard to come by. Many folks even used to experiment with kits making all sorts of weird weapons but not so much anymore. When the ATF started requiring the whacking of barrels it flipped our little world upside down