Full Disclosure:
After a conversation I had with Gene Kelly of American Gunsmithing Institute (AGI), he offered me this course at no charge in exchange for an honest review in a written article for SurvivalBlog. There were no other strings attached, and I was not pressured in any way about the outcome of this review. He did not ask for a preview of the article, nor was he offered one before publication. This review is my own opinion of the course after having spent time taking it and passing the tests involved.
My Background
I have been interested in firearms and gunsmithing since I purchased my first Llama 1911 clone when I was in college. Before YouTube and social media, if you were going to learn gunsmithing, you had to hang out in gun shops hoping to learn a few crumbs of information as you peered over the counter at those who worked in the back. You also had the opportunity to attend a few schools that taught gunsmithing, such as Trinidad Junior College, Lassen College in California, or the Colorado School of Trades, in Colorado. There were others, but being from the Southwest those were the names that I knew.
When I graduated from college, my chosen career path did not have firearms in it. While I continued to be a collector, shooter, and reloader, my gunsmithing was strictly amateur.
Then I bought my first horse. Since I lived in an apartment, I had to board it at a facility near where I worked and lived. It turned out that the person who owned the boarding facility was a graduate of Colorado School of Trades.
I spent many an evening after work talking with him and picking his brain on firearm-related subjects, until one time when he asked me why I didn’t go to school myself for gunsmithing. I made some lame excuses about already having a chosen career and a busy schedule along with a full-time job. He merely pointed out that Colorado School of Trades was just down the road a few tens of miles and that they had an evening program designed to accommodate those who worked during the day. That brought me up short. He was right. There was really nothing stopping me from doing that. I had a good paying job and could afford the tuition. Since I lived nearby, I didn’t have to worry about room and board, and they had openings that fit my schedule. The next week I enrolled.
For the next 16 months, I spent five nights a week learning the trade at Colorado School of Trades. They were rated one of the top schools for gunsmithing. Graduates had no problems finding jobs with manufacturers, gun shops, or even starting their own gunsmithing businesses. I had a blast. But it wasn’t easy.
My personal schedule was absolutely crazy, but I ate it up. I started work at 6:30 am. At 3:00 pm, I headed home to eat an early dinner and take care of chores. Then, by 5:00 pm I was off to school, where I stayed until 10:00 pm working in classrooms, the machine shop, on workbenches, oil, cleaners, and firearms. It was absolute heaven for me. I still had no idea what I would do with that education, but that was a problem for “future-me”.
Shortly after that intense time of education, I became a victim of the “Peace dividend” of 1991. My daytime job was working at a defense contractor. When the Soviet Union fell, congress cut the defense spending budget and thousands of jobs were lost almost overnight. There were so many engineers laid off all at once from so many defense contractors that you often saw your fellow worker flipping burgers at McDonald’s. I myself handled the deep fryer for a couple of days before getting a job as a sales person at Radio Shack. Those are not fond memories, but you do what you have to do to take care of your family, even if it means working three or four jobs.
I eventually recovered and ended up back in the employ of a government contractor, but the dream of being a gunsmith remained distant. I had no regrets over spending the money on the education and the time spent learning the trade, but life moved on with focuses on family, building a house, kids, mortgages, and loans. Life just got in the way, and I did what any self respecting person would do. I buckled down and focused on my obligations over my desires. Years passed almost in a blur.
The Conversation
I’ve never met Gene, but I spent some time writing technical articles and manuals as part of my career and was an avid reader of SurvivalBlog. When Gene started supporting SurvivalBlog’s writing contest, I got the idea to approach him and ask about doing a review of the gunsmithing course. I, of course, had completely selfish motives in that I wanted to get back into gunsmithing. My kids were grown and my career had moved into being “self-employed”, which is just another catchphrase for working harder than you ever have, getting paid less that you thought was possible, and getting blamed whenever anything goes wrong. At least you usually enjoy what you are doing when self-employed.
I tried to get Gene to donate the entire Advanced Master Course, but his response was “Let’s just do the Level I and see what happens.” I eagerly awaited the course material.
The Course
I’m not really sure what my expectations were. The course arrived. As I opened the boxes, I was met with an array of paperwork and DVDs. Some DVDs were in a binder, while many others were individually wrapped in plastic. There were loose papers throughout the box and in no particular order.
I’m the kind of guy that reads technical manuals for fun. I wrote them for a living, so I can respect the work that goes into them. I also read the instruction manuals first before messing with any tool or appliance. My wife appreciates that as I rarely break things. This was a different animal. There wasn’t a carefully-written manual explaining how everything worked. There were bits and pieces here and there, but no coherent instructions on how to proceed.
I learned later that much of the confusion was because of how I had obtained the course. Had I purchased it from the website, the office would have had a much better clue as to what was going on. As far as they knew, they were just told to ship the package to me. A long phone call later with the office straightened everything out. I was registered as a student and started sorting out the paperwork.
There was information on obtaining an FFL and instruction on how to deal with those pesky city/county/HOA rules, but I’ll get to that a bit later. By the time I read every piece of paper that came with the course, I’d spent a couple of days and still felt like I did back when I was a freshman in college. It seemed that everyone around me knew what to do, but I was still somewhat clueless.
Much of the paperwork dealt with things that clearly weren’t going to happen quickly (like the FFL stuff), and much of it had the flavor of marketing. It seemed that AGI wanted to assure you that you hadn’t wasted money on the course. It is expensive. I hadn’t spent the money, but if you had and were in the vulnerable stage of not knowing how things worked, you might be having buyer’s remorse at this early point. I felt that the paperwork spent a considerable amount of time trying to get me excited and hyped about starting this journey. Enough! I get it. Let’s get on with it.
Introduction
The first set of DVDs is appropriately called the “Introduction”. What do you know! The very first DVD is titled “Student orientation”. (Oh wait, this is DVD-based learning. Of course, the orientation would be on a DVD!) Clearly, AGI intended this for someone who would be so excited that they would skip the paperwork and just throw that first DVD in the player.
The orientation DVD explained how the course worked and walked you through the classes, the type of learning they taught, introduced the instructors, and a whole lot more.
I was starting to feel more comfortable. It was just like being back in college where you had someone walking you around the university explaining the operation and where to go for various things.
In addition to walking you through a bunch of firearm-specific terms, the DVDs introduce you to AGI’s method of teaching. They call it DF&R — Design, Function & Repair. Having been a product of Colorado School of Trades, I was intimately familiar with the problem with many, if not most, gunsmiths. They operate how they have been trained. If they went to school, they imitate the methods that they learned there. If they served as an apprentice, they imitate the methods that their mentor taught them. Sometimes it is good stuff. Sometimes, not so much. Most of the gunsmiths I’ve seen are merely parts-swappers. They change out parts in the firearm until it works. I’ve seen them put parts back in backwards and not understand why they didn’t work.
As part of the aforementioned peace dividend, I did a stint as an alarm technician for an alarm company. One of their clients was a major factory service center for rifle scopes. It absolutely amazed me how many techs had bins at their feet of perfectly good parts that they had pulled from scopes and tossed in the bin as unserviceable. Like I said, many are merely parts-swappers.
The DF&R Methodology
AGI’s goal with DF&R is to make sure that you understand the firearm that you are working on. In order to effectively repair it, you must first understand how it the firearm was designed, what each part does, and how it interacts with the parts around it. If you don’t completely understand what the designer of the firearm had in mind when they created it, how can you effectively repair it? Sometimes things are obvious, but in some firearms it’s pretty subtle. The whole course, from start to finish, hammers that concept into you.
I don’t remember any of that from when I attended CSoT. I’m not throwing any shade on CSoT, but the personal instruction from the school fell far short of that level of detail. I was never pressed into that kind of thinking from any gunsmith that I learned from. They may have understood it and they may have lived by that concept, but they didn’t seem to be able to pass that on to me. I guess you were just supposed to absorb that as you worked through the problems.
AGI’s training was a nice change. They stated a clear goal. Every problem was presented within the framework of understanding what the designer had in mind, how the part actually performed in its intended function, and what methods you needed to employ to repair the issue. It’s a refreshing take.
Then came the test. Yep, the introduction course has a test. I eagerly logged online to the test platform. This was an apparent upgrade. Previously, you would have to take the test, mail your answers into the company, and patiently wait for the results. Now, you know the results right away. Piece of cake. Five hours of DVD is like sitting in a week’s worth of lectures at a college. I watched all 5 hours in a single day. I thought, “This is gonna be easy.”
Handguns
The first real gunsmithing part of the course starts with the 1911. John Moses Browning knew his stuff and may be the greatest firearms designer of all time. It is appropriate that the course starts with one of his most well-known firearms. It embodies almost all of the important concepts that you need to get started in understanding how modern firearms work. From there the course moves onto other single action firearms that introduce new operating concepts. At this point, I’m starting to see how each DVD builds upon the preceding DVD. There are 35 hours of instruction on handguns. Single action auto, double action auto, single action revolver, double action revolver– each feeding into the knowledge learned from the last session. The 35 hours of instruction primarily came from Bob Dunlap. It took me two full weeks to work through those videos. Then came the test…and the first shock.
I’ve taken a lot of tests in my life. For my education, it’s often rote memorization. The instructor says something, and I’m supposed to take copious notes and regurgitate that information on the test. With AGI’s test, there were clearly some things I remembered the instructor talking about. However, there were some questions that I have no memory of having been addressed. There were things on the test that I didn’t even understand.
I didn’t finish the test. I went back to the course and started digging. Oh wait, there is a spiral bound booklet here entitled “Handgun Notes”. I was supposed to be taking notes myself, but AGI had conveniently given us a bound notebook of important things that were taught within the course. I eagerly read through and studied the notes for two days. Then, I went back to re-take the test.
Nope! There were still things on the test that I was not getting. Then it hit me: DF&R. I’m supposed to understand the firearm well enough that I can reason through what is going on.
At this point, I had carefully watched and re-watched the DVD several times, taken notes, and read their notes. Then, it hit me. I’m sitting in a classroom session. The classroom can only take you so far. You must have the firearms in your hands to fully comprehend what is going on.
No problem. I own many of these firearms myself. I decided it was time to get some hands dirty!
I disassembled/reassembled every handgun I owned multiple times. Those firearms that I didn’t own, I begged and borrowed family and friends under the guise of “I’ll thoroughly clean it for you at no charge!”. By some miracle, I managed to get my hands on about 80% of the firearms talked about in the course. Working on them and watching the videos a third time took another couple of weeks before I went back to the test.
Yep, that was the difference. I was finally able to think through the problems on the test and managed to pass.
I was understanding why AGI encourages you to get an FFL early on. I still had rifles and shotguns to work through, and I wasn’t sure if I’d worn out my welcome with family and friends yet. So, it was probably time to tackle that FFL part
The FFL
One option you have is to “work” for an established gun shop or FFL holder. If they are doing the intake, handling firearm storage, providing the working area, and doing the paperwork, you can often work under their license to have hands-on access to firearms. They do have to jump through a few hoops to allow you to do that, as the ATF is a bit particular about FFL holders allowing access to just anyone. Yet, if you have a good relationship, this can be a desirable option.
The FFL is often a “chicken or the egg” kind of thing. The BATFE requires you to have a business in order to obtain an FFL. If you live in an area that has very little bureaucracy, it often works to your advantage.
One county, near where I live, has a policy that they don’t care and don’t want to know if you are running a business out of your home. They’ll even give you a letter that states as much. I wasn’t so lucky. I live in a semi-rural area that just incorporated about five years before I started this journey. It’s been frustrating because all I see is a reduction in governmental services (sheriff/police, fire, animal control, street maintenance, etc…) and a significant increase in tax rates to pay for “salaries”. That and the propensity of the zoning inspector to write tickets for things like “non-native species of weeds” (“weeds” that are actually edible asparagus, which do voluntarily grow in wild spaces in our area) has driven me crazy.
For an FFL, the city decided that even though I was not going to be operating a storefront, they would only grant me a business license variance if I had a written letter of approval from every neighbor within a certain distance of my house. AGI has some information that specifically addressed overzealous ordinances like this, but to change those meant a court battle with the city. I’m confident that I would have prevailed if I had chosen that route, but I just wasn’t willing to take on that fight. In the end, I withdrew my FFL application. I decided there had to be another way to fight this battle. It didn’t help that the ordinance demanded that the FFL already be issued in order to get the city license. Like I said, it’s the chicken or the egg scenario. I’m sure I could have gotten one or the other to bend on who went first, but I could not get past the requirement for written permission from neighbors.
Bob Dunlap
I’m going to take a moment here and talk about AGI’s primary instructor. Bob Dunlap (RIP) is an amazing instructor. Notice I said “is” not “was”. Bob passed on in 2020, and I regret that I never had the opportunity to meet the man. His knowledge of firearms ran deep. His method of teaching was informative, yet entertaining at the same time. Clearly, he was a man confident in his lifetime knowledge of DF&R. I don’t know if this concept originated with him or not, but it was almost a religion with him. He knew his stuff, and he knew how to communicate it. Gene has stated publicly that one of his goals was to preserve the knowledge that Bob brought to the table. I appreciate that Gene managed to do that. I’m sure only a small part of his knowledge made it onto the DVDs, just as I am equally sure that Bob had forgotten more than I will ever learn about firearms and gunsmithing. I cannot say enough positive things about Bob as an Instructor. I have heard some gunsmiths deride AGI for supposedly riding on Bob’s coattails, but I think they missed the boat. Yes, Gene has made a business based on Bob’s knowledge, but it was with the full knowledge and permission of Bob. These DVDs are worth their weight in gold because of Bob.
Decision Time
At this point, I was sold on the course. I didn’t pay for it, but after just this first part of the course, I was willing to shell out the dough to continue. I wanted more.
I called Gene and talked to him about the rest of the course. At the time of starting the course, the Professional Gunsmithing Level 1 course was right at $5,000. They offered level II, Master, and Enhanced Master courses as well. I was sold on it. I purchased the upgrade to the Enhanced Master Gunsmithing course with the complete tool package. This package has 574 hours of DVD training, along with most of the tools necessary to get started in your own gunsmithing business. The upgrade of the course was roughly $10,000, and the tools were approximately another $5,000. For the next month, UPS and FedEx made regular stops at my house delivering a Grizzly lathe, a drill press, grinder, many, many hand tools with many specialty tools for the gunsmith. Yes, it was pricey, but I was sold. I’d experienced enough to recognize this was, hands down, the best gunsmith training I’d ever had. Yes, it’s even better than CSoT. Don’t get me wrong, CSoT was a good school. If I’d had Bob Dunlap as an instructor there, I’d probably be saying these things about them as well. But he wasn’t. AGI won the lottery in that respect. Bob is gone, but part of his legacy lives on in the AGI training.
Covid and other stuff
Sadly, right after I spent the money and upgraded, life again threw a couple of curveballs at my family. My primary job evaporated and I became self-employed full time. My spare time dropped essentially to zero as I pushed to get my self-employment off the ground and running. I couldn’t go after the gunsmithing business, as I hadn’t solved the FFL issue yet. I had so little free time, I couldn’t even watch the DVDs. I was back to working 16-18 hour days, six days a week, and I was just barely hanging on. Then the Covid pandemic hit.
Covid was brutal to the economy and to most families. It was a different story with us though. By the grace of God, my self-employment was considered an “essential business”, and it grew by leaps and bounds. It became too much for my wife and I to handle, so I ended up hiring my son away from his job to work for me full time. Things were great and purring along. Even when I thought we were going to struggle over some national news headline or shift in the market, we managed to keep our heads above water for years.
This year, I began to think about retiring and while staring at the bookshelf one night, I suddenly remembered the unfinished gunsmithing course that I had paid for but never finished. The FFL problem had been solved by Covid for me. The city had rewritten the ordinances and now they were encouraging home-based businesses. If you fit their published criteria, it was now easy to get an FFL. I filled out the paperwork and three days later had the city license in hand. The BATFE was next. Within two months, I had that license as well.
During this time of waiting, I started on the courses again. I still begged and borrowed to get firearms to work on, but now with the FFL it is a whole lot easier. That opens up partnership opportunities with pawnshops, gun shops, and other places that are willing to let you clean their firearms while you learn how they work.
The Rest of the Level I Course and Testing
After the handguns section of the course comes the shotguns. I struggled with this section of the course, because there are so many types of shotguns and I had such limited access to actual firearms. Forty-one hours of DVD instruction on shotguns seemed like an eternity. I watched the DVDs multiple times with many pauses, as Bob Dunlap showed the functioning with cutaway guns and props. Eventually, I felt confident enough to take the test and did manage to pass. Again, many of the questions on the test were not explicitly spoken about in the course. The questions are given in the form of “a customer brings you X shotgun and says it does Y or Z…”. The question will set parameters, for example, by saying “You’ve checked (certain) parts and they work; how do you diagnose and fix the problem?”.
The test is multiple choice or True/False. On the multiple choice, there is usually one answer that is obviously wrong and one answer that looks like it could be wrong. But the kicker is that there are two or more answers that could be right. If you understand the question and understand the design and function of the firearm, you can see where one is wrong and the other is right, but if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, they may both look right. Other questions will give you a list of things that could be the answer and you have to choose more than one. These are well-written tests. They truly do weed out those who are just trying to regurgitate memorized answers or those that don’t understand. If you get stuck, you can always pause the test and go back to the DVDs again.
Rimfire rifles and Center fire rifles make up the remainder of the course. It includes 27 hours of rimfire instruction and 44 hours of centerfire rifle instruction. Again, the test is well written and manages to weed out those who aren’t getting it.
I did fail the shotgun course the first time I took the test. You have to have at least an 80% to pass, and I had a 79%. The tests tell you what you got wrong, though it won’t give you the right answer on those questions. You simply have to go back to the instruction material, study the part you need, and then retake the test.
I do not know how many times you can take the test. The written instructions that I had seem to be from the time when you had to send in your written test for grading. You were allowed one retest and then they charged you a fee for further retakes. I don’t know how that works now that the testing is pretty much all online. If you don’t have access to the Internet, I’m pretty sure they can still accommodate the written tests as well.
The .22 Rimfire Rifles section and the Center Fire Rifle sections of the coursework were straight forward. I had no trouble with those sections. How well you do on the tests is really determined by how well you pay attention in the classroom (the DVDs), what your current level of experience is, and how many of the different types of firearms you have access to as you work through the section.
Extras
There are an additional 23 hours of course material that you are not tested on. These courses cover things like which jobs are the consistent moneymakers in your gunsmithing business, gun cleaning secrets, relining .22 barrels, a history of Smith & Wesson firearms, stock refinishing, glass bedding, and building an M1 Garand from a parts kit. You also get over 2,000 pages of firearms schematics, a handy drill and tap chart and more. Most of these extras can be purchased off of their website separately if you want. However, to get the core of the course, you have to purchase the actual Level I package.
With the Level I package, you also get a 1-year Silver+ membership in the Gunsmithing Club of America. This is a resource that I didn’t value in the first year that I had the course. I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t utilize it like I should have. They have a library of resources online that enhance and build on the core of the course. There are also forums where you can ask questions when you get stuck and other students as well as professional gunsmiths will help. The instructors actively read the forums and often join in the discussions. I do have to wonder how many students undervalue that resource. They tell you its value, but we are all so jaded by social media today that online resources are often ignored and overlooked. I have since rejoined at my own cost. Even if you don’t take the course, I think it’s worthwhile to join it because of the resources that it offers.
Costs
Yes, this is expensive, but it is quality education. I didn’t pay for the Level I course, but I was so impressed by the quality and quantity of the information that I spent another ~$15,000 out of my own pocket to upgrade to the full Enhanced Master Gunsmith with the tools. I didn’t need some of the tools. I already had a lathe, drill press, and grinder along with many of the hand tools, but I simply sold the ones I didn’t need on Facebook Marketplace and/or Craigslist. I came out ahead in the game.
As of the writing of this article, the Level 1 will set you back $5,997 with an online streaming version at $3,997. I highly encourage you to get the DVD version. Yes, I know that the world has gone to streaming, but you can’t expect AGI to keep access to the video streams open for 30 years. The DVDs, however, are in your library whenever you need them. They are so rich with information. You can refer back to them over and over, even if it’s just to refresh your memory when you get a firearm AGI covered and you don’t see that often.
DVD players are now quite inexpensive. A dedicated DVD player on Amazon can be picked up for less than $100. A quality DVD player is under $200. Most home entertainment systems can play DVDs as well as most laptops. Even if you don’t have an internal player, USB DVD drives are also inexpensive. Spend the extra and get the course on DVD. You can thank me later for that advice.
The other courses add to the cost but note that AGI will not make you pay the full cost if you are upgrading the course. If you’ve already paid for a lower level, they will deduct that cost from the upgraded course.
AGI also has many other mini courses that do not come in the four core courses. You can purchase these off of their website. However, if you will get on their mailing list, a couple of times a year, they run sales and you can save upwards of 33% or more on the cost of many of the additional courses.
What Didn’t Work For Me
I’ve spent some time talking about how wonderful these courses are if you want to become a gunsmith, but there were some very frustrating things as well. Primarily, I don’t care for their “Student Advisors”. It may just be my own expectations, but when I was in college 40 years ago, a student advisor was generally a professor in your chosen field of study. If you were a Mechanical Engineer, you generally had a professor from the mechanical engineering program that was assigned to you as an advisor. Likewise an Electrical Engineer would have a professor from that department as an Advisor. They were more than just a person answering the phone. They knew something about the subject. They could guide you.
AGI’s “student advisors” seem to be little more than a human interface call center to direct your questions somewhere else. I’ve never had an AGI student advisor actually be able to answer a question for me. The receptionists on the other hand, are extremely helpful and go out of their way to make sure you get what you need. It seems silly to me to have a receptionist that is more helpful than a student advisor. On the plus side, the student advisors did follow up to make sure whoever they referred my question to actually answered it. My experience may also be tainted by how I entered the course, but I didn’t even have one assigned to me until I had a problem I struggled to solve. He couldn’t answer the question and had to tell me he would contact one of the teachers. He did follow up with me about a week later to check if my question had been answered, but no answer came through that channel. Instead, the question was answered by the helpful people on the Gun Club of America (GCA) forums which is closely associated with AGI.
The other thing that didn’t work for me was the marketing material that was part of the course. Hopefully, this will get updated soon (if it hasn’t been already). The marketing material I got was pretty much how to write an effective yellow pages ad or newspaper/magazine ad. Today, marketing is all about social media and networking. Web presence and social media presence are mandatory for marketing. We don’t even have yellow page directories anymore. Much of the online marketing that reaches out to you is spammy in nature and most likely a scam or pretty close to it. AGI does give some effective verbal advice on creating relationships with other businesses/industries that can benefit from your services, but this is an area that really needs help. In the meantime, you may actually be able to get some help from local community colleges or online courses. Even YouTube has good training in online marketing, though discernment is a must.
I do believe AGI is actively addressing that issue as this year, I received significant marketing help through the GCA. I would be interested to know if the marketing material sent with the modern kits has improved.
Conclusion
The real question is: “Should I part with the money, in today’s market?” I believe the answer to that is a firm “Yes.” The AGI Gunsmithing courses are solid. Some of the videos of Bob Dunlap are obviously mastered for VHS tape and lack the clarity of modern HDTV productions, but the information is good. AGI has done a pretty good job at cleaning these old videos up and presenting them in a DVD format, despite the lower resolution. Who knows, AI may advance to the point where AGI could use it to enhance these older videos. I’m all for that, as long as the process doesn’t affect the cutaway views of the firearms used as examples. For now, I’m okay just having the information anyway that I can get it.
There are other good instructors that are part of AGI. Their teaching is good and production value of the videos is up to modern standards, but I hope they never get rid of Bob Dunlap’s videos. That man’s videos should be considered a national treasure!
When compared to more traditional schools such as Lassen College, Colorado School of Trades, Trinidad Junior College, or even online options such as Sonoran Desert Institute, I believe that AGI is the superior offering for classroom learning. You will occasionally hear people say that they would never pay a school because you can learn all you need to on YouTube or similar streaming options. Just remember, any information pulled off of a social media platform is generally worth what you paid for it. I’m sure there is good information out there. I’m sure there are quality instructors out there as well, but I’ve seen more garbage promoted on these platforms than good information.
Where a platform like Colorado School of Trades has an advantage is that they actively operate a gunsmithing service center. As a student, you have plenty of access to various firearms to get hands-on learning along with the classroom experience. AGI, on the other hand is a self-paced DVD based classroom. While the classroom experience is far superior, if you are not self motivated enough to find ways to get your hands on actual firearms, your learning will struggle.
AGI’s market is clearly the person who is self motivated enough to want to run their own business (full or part time) and you are expected to find ways to access firearms. As part of that push, they do have many suggestions such as forming relationships with pawn shops or other gun shops to clean and inspect their firearms. They also have a program to help you pay for your education by simply cleaning firearms. You will need an FFL to do pretty much any of that unless you are working in another gun shop, under their FFL.
AGI was also able to work around my many interruptions in taking this course. I started the process in 2018 and didn’t finish until 2026. I can’t think of any other program that is flexible enough to work with a person through those kind of delays.
If you are motivated enough, I don’t think you can go wrong with AGI’s programs. As an online school, I believe their program is head and shoulders above any other online platform or program. If you are truly motivated and take the extra steps needed to gain access to hands on experience with firearms, then I believe they are head and shoulders above traditional schools as well. If you are on your own with no access to other gunsmiths, they even have the ability to have you ship the firearm to them where they will fix it for you. They will charge you for it, but you will learn what they had to do to fix it and you will simply charge the customer for what it cost you.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to learn through AGI’s DVD courses and hope this information is helpful to those interested in learning quality gunsmithing.
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JWR Adds: American Gunsmithing Institute’s website is https://americangunsmithinginstitute.net/
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