Posted on 01/08/2013 8:47:18 PM PST by marktwain
Defense Distributed has created a website that is the "island of misfit (firearms) objects" that others have censored from the web. Chief among these are the data to print a complete, functional AR15 magazine, including the spring.
The current data is limited to a five round design, but it appears that it could easily be altered to a 10, 20, or 30 round design, especially if the maker is willing to add cheap and reliable steel springs.
The necessary springs can be hand made from wire, if desired.
Dean Weingarten
The link is live at the site.
No, it isn’t. You’re simply not aware of what used to be cranked out on P&W machines when they did only one caliber, only one twist all day long. There were fewer machines in operation in WWI or WWII for all the rifles we cranked out then.
The reason why these dozens of barrel manufactures seem to produce so little is that they’re doing a blizzard of bores and twists, and all that one-off work slows them down. If you set up the sine-bar P&W machines to do 1-in-10, .308 barrels all day long, you’d crank out hundreds of tubes per day (and the machines have two spindles per machine, so the operator is prepping a second while the other spindle is working on a barrel). That’s pre-WWI machines I’m talking about.
The hydraulic tracers in WWII made this speed up. You lost the flexibility of the sine bar to gain throughput by setting the machine up to do one caliber, one twist, and then did the same thing, again and again and again.
There could be many more barrel makers, btw, for an investment of $100 to $300K for the tooling apiece. Modern CNC deep hole machines make this all go faster. Why don’t we have more barrel makers? Right now, the market is pretty well equipped. I can get barrel blanks in popular calibers all day long with a phone call. By buying a dozen of the same twist/caliber at a time, all in 1.250” blanks, I get speedy turn-around.
And those are premium barrels. Want to make things really boogy? Then go to one hole/one-twist barrels on a cold forging machine - ie, give up quality for yield. This is how Remington cranks out barrels.
The technology to make barrels isn’t secret.
I think making primers that worked consistently would be extremely difficult and dangerous to do at home.
I realize you can make potassium chlorate with bleach and salt substitute, but being able to salvage primers, prepare them for re-use and form the primer material into a useful and consistent product would take a lot of work, time and material.
I think it would be way more feasible to just resort back to a flintlock type of ignition.
Actually, percussion caps is as far back as we’d have to go.
Flintlocks require black powder, and black powder ground very fine. Very fine black powder is, IMO, more dangerous than priming compounds.
Yes, but it doesn’t have to be packed precisely like a primer and you don’t have to worry about each little anvil being in the right place. Chlorate primers are corrosive too. The tolerances for cartridges to operates consistently are a lot tighter, plus it would be very time consuming to produce enough by hand. If it were to come to not having any primers available, I imagine by then there wouldn’t be any smokeless propellant either. We’d end up going back to manufacturing our own black powder like mentioned earlier.
Smokeless propellant isn’t difficult to make.
Making a particular burning rate of smokeless propellant.... well, that takes some work.
But making something like gun cotton and then molding it - not that difficult.
It all seems like a huge problem to people who are liberal arts majors, who know nothing about manufacturing or machining... but there are enough of us out here who read poetry only as a hobby because we knew it would never pencil out a family budget. The barrier to making one’s own powder and primers is not as high as some would believe.
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I remember a documentary of how the Brown Bess muskets were made, essentially wrapping flat steel around a dowel.
And a shotgun can be made damascus style with a higher grade of wire wrapped around the right size rod and either brazed or hard soldered. Or to just get a chrome-moly tube say from a roll bar.
Want to see a fascinating movie about making damascus barrels?
Here:
http://damascus-barrels.com/Movie.html
Saw this in a class on restoring damascus shotgun barrels last summer. The level of work that could be accomplished by some of the barrel houses around Liege, Belgium, with nothing but manual labor and forges is amazing.
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>> The level of work that could be accomplished by some of the barrel houses around Liege, Belgium, with nothing but manual labor and forges is amazing.
And of course the modern descendent of those businesses is FN Herstal, who also had long association with John Moses Browning, to tie things back to the USA.
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