Stay Away from Bear Creek Arsenal.com

[oak18]

PSA has good stuff. You buy a PSA CHF upper with FN barrel and Geissele hand guard, add a Microbest or Toolcraft BCG from PSA, it is pretty damn good. That upper is not a $300 upper.

[crufflers]

Not really, I was pointing out that PSA does have pretty premium uppers and BCG's these days and you pay for them. You add-on a $300 tube to a CHF and the upper is not going to be much less than $700-800.

BCA, jury is out, but my upper is good to go so far.

[CoopsDad]

I've bought three uppers from them and been pleased with each. They're good shooters and, with the calibers I got, they're not long range tack drivers. I bought uppers in fat, slow calibers for short and intermediate range hunting (7.62x39, .350 Legend, .458 Socom). The x39 and .458 are both side-chargers.

Now that someone above said they have a .22WMR upper, I can see another dent in my credit card coming soon.

[19K]

This is a psa for the good of everybody.

I've been buying parts from BCA.com for the past few builds, and they've been decent enough that I didn't feel like there were any issues despite their outlandishly cheap prices on barrels and uppers in general.
.
My latest purchase was on 6/24 for a 24" SS 223 wylde barrel for a bench build.

The card was charged on the 24th, Friday.

On the 27th, Monday, CC company gave me a call about a dubious charge for someone paying their bills from Apple with my card. I said it sure wasn't me and told them to stop the transaction.

6/28, Tuesday, I called BCA asking them if the order is proceeding forward as it still shows "Processing" on my order status. They said they're just taking their sweet time, I asked if they've already charged my card, they said yes, cards are charged the moment the order was placed. I said "great, I'll wait then.

I checked the SS 24" barrel on their website at the same time, they had 10 in stock originally, now it's down to 7, now on Tuesday.

6/29, Wednesday, I checked my order status again, it still shows "Processing." I checked the SS 24" barrel on their site again, it now shows 5 in stock. None of my business, I thought, I paid for mine last week.

6/30 Thursday, I checked my order status again, still shows "Processing" The 24" SS barrel now shows 2 left, then, out of stock on their website. I thought, "None of my business, I paid for mine last Friday."

I open my email, and see an email from BCA titled "Please contact BCA regarding your order *********. I open it, and it reads, "there has been a problem with your order, your SS barrel item number ******* is out of stock. Please contact BCA for a recommended substitute product. If we do not hear from you in 48 hours, we will automatically cancel the out of stock order."


Now, a smirk across my face, I'm thinking these guys can't seriously have sold MY barrel, that I paid for on 6/24, to 10 other guys, over the course of a week, one at a time, while they took my money, sat on it, and watched the inventory go from 10 in stock to out of stock, over the course of a week, all the while telling me on the phone that it's just "taking time to process the order."

Yes, I did call my cc company to make sure that BCA did indeed charge me for the order the day I had placed it. So they did take my money and sit on it for a whole week while selling MY barrel that I had already paid for, to 10 other customers.

I'm going to call them tomorrow to see what they'll say, and I struggled about whether to post this now or not, as I don't want to put them under the spotlight without giving them a chance to right this mess first. But this is just clowning on another level. I'll keep this thread updated after I talk to them tomorrow.

Meanwhile, if ya want to buy from Bear Creek Arsenal, go right ahead, maybe it will work out for you. As for me, we'll see.

[19K]

Return it.


I wonder if BCA owners would fire that rep if they heard our conversation that day. So the upper went back the day it arrived to me in its original box, paid for by BCA.


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https://abc11.com/amp/ice-immigration-raid-enforcement/5122017/

[Mezcalfud]

I've learned that online buying is a gamble no matter who you deal with. You win some but rarely lose other than " I want it and I want it now". We expect the integration of computers and humans to be instantaneous and flawless but I can't get f**king Alexa to tell me the weather to save my life! OP should change the title.

[TomReloaded]

One of my bca uppers is great. The other probably has a bad BCG, but it's not a huge deal.

This is what you get from the absolute cheapest upper company. I think realistic expectations is important.

[Russian Bot]

Likely what you see listed on the website as inventory on the shelf is physical inventory.
What you don't see is that the inventory changes as the items are removed from physical inventory and shipped, not when orders are placed.
What you are assuming is that they would remove a barrel from physical inventory to ship you, but what they are actually doing is pulling barrels off the shelf to ship in the order that the orders were placed.

So lets say that 50 barrels were made last week and they were placed into physical inventory.
Then 60 people come along and place orders.
Note that the order acceptance system is not tied to physical inventory and no "reservation" is happening when there is a sale.
The sales system simply charges the card and places your order in a que for the warehouse jockies to pack up and ship.
Then the barrels start shipping out and the inventory in the website whittles down to zero as the first 50 orders are filled.
Eventually, the physical inventory will run dry before all 60 of the orders can be filled, leaving the last 10 people without any physical inventory to ship.
That situation generates the flag that got you the email about your item not being in stock.

I don't work for BCA, but that's my guess on how these problems happen.

It could even be so simple as that the printer in the warehouse spits out orders realtime and by ordering on a friday, your order ends up at the bottom of the pile after the rest of the orders come in all weekend.
Then the warehouse jockies show up monday morning and start pulling orders off the top of the pile to keep themselves busy.
In such a situation, you would want to place your order on a monday morning to be at the top of the weekend stack because the warehouse jockies don't care to pull the orders from the BOTTOM of the pile to better serve the customers in the sequence that the orders arrived.

Ummmm, the Free Quick books does exactly that. Wix does that, Shopify does that.
If whoever set up BCA's system didn't set that feature up yikes.

[CoopsDad]

His post said nothing about the quality of the parts; his entire complaint centered around charging his card and then not delivering the upper it showed was in stock.

But since you brought up quality, I have three uppers from BCA and the worst thing I can say about them is the barrel and upper on my .350 Legend are not a match. All three shoot well; a 7.62x39, the .350 Legend and a .458 Socom. All are short/intermediate range carbines intended for hunting in the woods and river bottoms. The x39 has probably 450-500 rounds through it, the .350 L has 100+/- and the .458 Socom has over 200 through it (gotta reload for .458 or be single). The only problem I had with any of these was with the .350L- it has feeding issues due to a magazine that had too narrow feed lips. That wasn't the upper's fault.

I'd buy a BCA upper any day. That said, I disassemble and reassemble everything I buy before using it but I haven't found a deficiency with any I've gotten so far.

[19K]

His post said nothing about the quality of the parts; his entire complaint centered around charging his card and then not delivering the upper it showed was in stock.

But since you brought up quality, I have three uppers from BCA and the worst thing I can say about them is the barrel and upper on my .350 Legend are not a match. All three shoot well; a 7.62x39, the .350 Legend and a .458 Socom. All are short/intermediate range carbines intended for hunting in the woods and river bottoms. The x39 has probably 450-500 rounds through it, the .350 L has 100+/- and the .458 Socom has over 200 through it (gotta reload for .458 or be single). The only problem I had with any of these was with the .350L- it has feeding issues due to a magazine that had too narrow feed lips. That wasn't the upper's fault.

I'd buy a BCA upper any day. That said, I disassemble and reassemble everything I buy before using it but I haven't found a deficiency with any I've gotten so far.

A total of 800 rounds between three rifles? Wow. I guess the hundreds of other reviews showing all their deficiencies mean nothing.

[phase1]

CC company gave me a call about a dubious charge for someone paying their bills from Apple with my card. I said it sure wasn't me and told them to stop the transaction.

This has happened to me once after ordering online about 6 years from another online retailer. There was 4 quick purchases of $10 & $2 apple purchases. It never happened again after that because I use a different card dedicated to online purchases.

[Big Chudungus]

Rock Bottom prices from a small operator has to also mean they farm their warehouse, shipping, CC processing, etc out to lowest tier fly-by-night operator who is also doing a few dozen other operations out of the same abandoned warehouse.

They got boxes of gun barrels next to boxes of dildos next to boxes of crucifixes under a unified inventory numbering system and a part time High School kid with stolen shopping cart does the picks and data entry and once a week the IT based in India resets inventory and most of the time it works OK.

Every once in a while I'll get Ebay or Amazon (before they started taking pics) saying "Delivered" but it wouldn't show up for a week.

I've learned (but will still forget) that if it matters when going to fetch an auto part or prescription you need to tell them to PHYSICALLY check if its really, really on the shelf like Computer says, and a rough description of part or number of pills on hand.

Got my Bank of the West ATM card hijacked and a perp took $100 per day out of same gas station ATM up in Gold Country. B of West made it right but all LEOs were decidedly disinterested. Pretty sure station and ATM will have CCTV and it wouldn't be just my card it would be a perp with shoe box full of cards draining the ATM, and he in turn would be linked to some operation able to defeat big bank security, and all that would involve lots of big State AND Fed charges.

[Angrysnarf]

Privacy.com is a good thing. One time use numbers.

Definitely gonna get that piston upper in a few months after my pistol is done.

[CoopsDad]

A total of 800 rounds between three rifles? Wow. I guess the hundreds of other reviews showing all their deficiencies mean nothing.

Three uppers- two in calibers that are know to be glitchy in AR-15s- that I've had zero problems with means enough to me that I'll order from them again.

[19K]

Three uppers- two in calibers that are know to be glitchy in AR-15s- that I've had zero problems with means enough to me that I'll order from them again.