Posted on 11/25/2012 9:50:09 AM PST by NewJerseyJoe
"On this Thanksgiving Day, let me say this: God Bless America the only country on this [bleep] planet where you still have the freedom to build AKs in defense of Motherland! The only country where a [bleep] shovel can become an awesome weapon of death and destruction."
(Excerpt) Read more at northeastshooters.com ...
My Mom used my M4 bayonet for digging weeds.
She wrecked it real good.
What could I say?
She still uses that thing today LOL
Saw that last night, this was hilarious and very clever.
The only machine tools he needed were:
- a lathe to do the chambering, and he really didn’t need that, it just sped things up.
- a drill press to drill the holes in the receiver and the gas port in the barrel.
You can chamber a barrel with a piloted set of reamers (a roughing reamer and a finish reamer) by hand, it will just take you a long time.
I keep telling people: If you want to make a gun, it’s not that difficult. The problem seems to be that too many people think that “making a gun” means “making an AR-15” instead of just “making a gun.”
AK’s were designed to be rushed out of factories that made tractors and farm equipment. The design has sloppy tolerances galore, uses stamped sheet steel and is rough as a cob. The only thing he really needed was the rifled barrel blank, which requires the capability to drill, ream and rifle a deep hole. That’s beyond the capabilities of most garage mechanics, but the rest of the gun? Pffft. Easy.
Such ingenuity and resourcefulness! That guy is one great American!
So much talent. So little to work with. One wonders what a good mill and some decent tools and kits would do.
It’s actually worth going to the site to read this. It’s on a forum and is complete with step by step pictures.
Could be a winter project for someone with a couple of tools in their garage.
If you make one, I want to be the second or third person to fire it.
(Or ninth, tenth - whatever. Not first.)
... from my cold dead hands...
I would have fired it straight-up, first time.
His barrel was thicker than normal, and he was using a stock bolt from the Romanian parts kit. As long as the bore looked clear and his firing pin protrusion was within spec, I’d have fired it without hesitation.
What he made had no direct involvement with chamber pressures.
Wry humor not on the menu for today, eh?
Once you have a good lathe, you can make almost anything in guns.
Once you have a good lathe and a bunch of ingenuity, you can even make barrels.
Harry Pope did.
People really should go to Ogden and look at the re-creation of the Browning Bros. shop in the museum. There is no mill in that shop.
There is, however, a milling attachment for the little lathe in the shop... and that’s all you need.
Someone who had an old 9 to 12” swing lathe, a set of collets, a long enough bed, a milling attachment and a steady rest can do almost anything involved with firearms machining.
The problem is the cost of the machine tools. It’s that Americans have forgotten how to do this stuff. 100 years ago, there were several widely-read magazines telling garage tinkerers how to do these things. Popular Mechanics and Popular Science used to tell people how to do these things from the 1960’s going backwards. High school shops were well equipped with machine tools.
Then we got over-run with the faux intellectuals peddling four-year degrees in utterly useless and vapid bullshit to every set of parents out there, and we became a nation of know-nothing liberal arts majors who can’t remember which way to spin the lug nuts on their tired when changing a flat.
No, not really. Got too many guns to work on, too little time.
Superb!!
Lathe is good. Milling machine better......a good broach cutter is important for those discriminating machinists.....
Shoot, shovel, and shut up.
You can make your own broach cutters from drill rod... on a lathe no less, harden and heat treat them yourself, and then shove them through with an arbor press (or other press).
There are guys who make their own bolt action receivers from scratch, after making their own tooling from scratch, and all they had to start with was something like a South Bend 9A lathe.
Sure, a Bridgeport or Deckel mill would be a nice addition to any shop, all I’m saying is that they’re not necessary and gunsmiths of 100 years ago made guns from stem to stern without any mill in their shop - because milling machines of their day were far too large for most gunsmithing shops.
The Bridgeport style of mill is a fairly recent development in machine tooling; before that, most mills were horizontal mills, most of which were far too heavy for small shops. The vertical mills of those days were also huge, rigid monsters which usually were 5,000lbs or more in weight. In fact, the guys who started the Bridgeport company started their business by trying to peddle a vertical head that you could hang on the predominate horizontal mills of the day - then in the late 1930’s, they finally decided “screw it, let’s just mount the head on our own mill table...” and the ubiquitous turret mill we know today was born. The earliest round-ram Bridgeports date to something like 1938.
touche!
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