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.
Anyone know how to cut Rifling groves ping?