Thank you to everyone on this post and a few others, I pulled the trigger yesterday and dove in head first on my Versa Max mods.
I welded the lifter ( I give myself a 95%, wasn't prepared with the right materials and wasn't going to stop to finish later, ended up using 316 SS filler wire). Had a slight catch when cycling manually, thinking it's more of an inertia, manual cycling thing though. Filed the feed latch and formed it to the follower , has intermittent double feed when loading doubles, so...... I am going to give it a lil bend if
It happens again today while in actual use. I went off of Pat Kelly's recommendation on opening the loading port and I'm very happy with how it turned out. I also feathered down the forward grip on the entire perimeter and coped it to match the opening of the loading port job.
It turned into a pretty long day and I'm excited to get it into action today to see how I did.
Thanks Again to everyone' for their sharing of experience and knowledge.
I will post some pics also, they were a big help in helping me do mine, trying to figure that out now.