Dennis & Brian\'s Build

We ground the firing pins to size. Made a jig, basically a little chuck mounted on a ground flat plate, to grind the heads and another to grind them to length.

Brian set up the cnc lathe to turn the hammers. We used Cutter\'s design for the hammer. While he was doing that I used my clock makers lantern pinion tool to cut the pivot wire for the extractor. We used .060 music wire for the pivot pins.

We hardened the hammers and the extractor using Cherry Red. Smells really bad when you put the red hot part in it so do it where you have good ventilation.

Got a little more done yesterday. Brian threaded the hammers and I spent the day putting the hex on the barrel. We didn\'t want to have to polish the hex, which we would have to do after cutting with and end mill, so we set it up to cut them with a carbide insert fly cutter. Had an indexer on one end, a tail stock on the other and the vise in the middle as close as we could get to the hex to minimize chatter. The set up is shown below and the finished product.

We got our barrel liners from Brownells and they measured .3095 so we are good to go there. May Loctite 609 them in tomorrow. We hope by next week we can put the whole bolt/barrel assembly together. Then on the cams and cocking ring.

I was so busy turning the hex I didn\'t get any pictures of Brian threading the hammers. I know he did part of it in the mill and then used a bottom tap to finish them by hand.

Well, we hit a clog in the wheel of progress. After 15 years the DRO on the Leblond lathe decided to go crazy. Brian ordered a new one from DRO Pros and it arrived yesterday so we need to get that installed.

Today, we did get the liners Loctite into the tubes, so I guess there are now barrels, and I put the bolts together.

Then we started on the DRO. The z scale is 80” and had to be cut down. We cut it on the radial arm saw and laid out a .5 x 3” piece of aluminum to mount it on. Brian is going to tap and drill the mounting holes and holes for the grub screws tonight so we can mount it tomorrow. I know this isn’t GG stuff but I thought someone might enjoy the pictures.

We did get the DRO installation finished so we can get back to the gun. Brain has the most organized home shop I have ever seen and I think the best equipped. That certainly makes building this GG a lot easier. The folks that do it on 3 in 1 machines and HF 7 x10\'s really have a lot more work to do. Anyway, here are a couple of pictures of the final DRO job and then I\'ll get back to gun stuff.

Back to the gun. Brain did finish the barrels to length over the weekend so the first thing we did this week was chamber them. We did purchase a chamber reamer from Bronwells. We just got the finish reamer since we only have 20 barrels to do. We set a stop and held the barrel in the vise as shown. We then used a pin gage in the bore to indicate on to get the barrel lined up on the x and z as shown. Of course, I should point out that we used a right angle head on the mill. It took a while to do all 20. We used lots of lub and pulled the reamer out a number of times to clean chips on every barrel.

It\'s now time to get the hex sleeves into the bolt carrier and barrel ring. We decided to use the great little jig we made at the start to line up the hex so everything was the same. We drilled and tapped a hole for a set screw to hold a hex in the jig. We then milled a short hex rod to fit into the jig. We took the test barrel we made and cut it down and milled part of it away to align the barrel plate on the side of the pin. Brian explained to me how you would use diamond shaped pins to align a part like this but he didn\'t have them. We cut the hex to length and used Loctite 609 to hold it in place.

Next we did the bolt carriers. Two pieces of sleeve were needed for the bolt carrier. We thought that they would line up but found that the main shaft binds where the long and short piece meet. In hind sight we should have made the hole in the bolt carrier under size so we could have turned the hex sleeves true on an arbor. We will need to run a broach through the bolt carrier to clean it up.

We wanted to make a brass socket so we could tighten the barrels in the barrel ring without marring up the hex on the end of the barrel. However, Brian decided to make the hex on the end of the barrel larger than it was suppose to be so we couldn\'t just broach a piece of brass because the hex wasn\'t a standard, nominal, or is it just a bastard size. That was a rather long discussion. So, since necessity is the mother of invention, we found that a 12mm six point socket could be lined with brass and fit perfectly. Sometimes you just get lucky......yea lucky. :>)

Got started on the cocking ring. Turned the outer ring. Making it out on 1144sp. We are not making the bottom slot as deep as the drawing so there is a larger area to silver solder. That means we will have a little extra work making the cocking switch piece.

Thanks for taking the time to do the posts.....  I\'m learning a lot

Markus

Great pictures and presentation.

As an employer for over 30 years, I was always looking
for someone like Brian. GREAT WORK !

I\'m very honored by your compliment , especially coming from you !
Thanks, Jerry .
Brain
PS We appreciate your help !  

:oops: Reverse Progress  :oops:

After a failed attempt at running a broach through the now Loctite hex sleeve in the bolt carriers we spent Friday morning boring the sleeves out of the bolt carriers and barrel rings. We ordered oversized sleeves which we will turn on a mandrel to insure the hex in concentric with the od. We will then redo the sleeves. You can see the very thin piece of the hex sleeve after boring. We were able to clean the bore of the Loctite with any damage to the bore. We have decided that the little extra piece of hex sleeve in the bolt carrier will not be Loctited in but just used as a spacer. In hind site, we wish we would have made the main shaft 5/8 and used a keyway rather than the sleeves.

We cut the extractor slot in the barrels Friday afternoon. We decided to cut them in the barrel ring and not to try to mill to a scribed line. We installed the barrels in the barrel ring and tighten them to 150 inch pounds. We did this so we could get them back in to the exact same position every time. We set the assemble up in the vise and used the right angle head to mill the slot in the barrel. This all seemed to work fine.

:twisted: More scrap  :twisted:

Saturday morning we decided to scrap the two piece cocking ring and redo it by grinding a cutter and making it one piece. We won\'t put it in the scrap pile until the other one is finished. The extra grooves were for solder.

Saturday was spent learning how to draw and covert a flat file of the cams to a wrapped file for the 3rd axis. We used a really great little program called \"CNCWrapper\" which sells for $25.00 to wrap the Y axis on the A or 3rd axis. You can check it out at their web site by the same name. While on the topic we used a great engraving program called Millwrite for engraving the barrels and bolts. He sells a hobby license for $90.00 and that is a real bargain. You can locate his site by searching for  \"Millwrite Version 6\". I have no connection to either of these other than I think their software is a great deal for a home shop machinist. We cut some wax to verify the program and verified it with full size patterns. We are going to try and get the cams cut tomorrow.

Thanks for sharing those sources and photos with us. Looking great.

Later 42rocker