Ignoring gun parts kits that you can buy in a lot of countries, assuming an isolated country has a complete blanket ban on firearms and related parts, could you realistically make a war-worthy gun with just a few machining tools and some chemical supplies? I can picture machining out and heat treating all the major parts, and even rifling out the barrel, along with getting your hands on some springs, and making your own bullets and smokeless powder, but what about getting your hands on some brass casings and primers?
Making brass would be tedious, but doable with a shop press and some dies to form the brass. Same goes for primer cups. The hardest part would be making smokeless powder and the priming compound itself.
would guncotton work?
saltpeter + sulfuric acid from batteries = nitric acid
nitric acid + cotton balls = guncotton
you can make saltpeter from bird poop and piss
Guncotton is easy to make but it has a lot of disadvantages. It quickly becomes unstable with time and exposure to the elements. It's very powerful so there's a high chance of wrecking the gun. I think you'll run into a lot of the same problems that
describes with some other early powder formulations. Sometimes the gun would explode, other times the discharge would be extremely weak.
Making nitrocellulose that's stable is the challenge. You also need to be able to form it into consistent grains of propellant that will burn at the same rate. If you had a good knowledge of chemistry and some lab equipment you might be able to do it, but it would definitely be the riskiest part of the whole process.
The most practical thing to try to make, other than black powder, would be Schultze powder. The Greener book anon mentioned above discusses it in detail. There's also this article from an old Scientific American magazine:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-schultz-white-gunpowder/
It is not as good as modern smokeless by any means but it was an improvement on black powder. And the process is basically "make nitrocellulose from sawdust instead of cotton"
It worked well enough, at least in shotguns, that some of the most famous shooters of that era refused to give it up even when real, safe, smokeless came on the market.
The easiest thing to do would be to salvage powder from nail gun blanks.
I actually think ammonpulver would be the easiest propellant to manufacture, as it's just ammonium nitrate mixed with charcoal. It does introduce problems with ammo storage though, as the compound will eat through the brass if left to sit
Zero knowledge is needed.
Complete production procedures have been published many times over the past century. It's on par with baking.
Fraankford Arsenal even used to make test batches using modified pasta equipment.
>It's on par with baking.
I call bullshit on this one. I can find millions of videos online showing me how to bake. There's not a single one showing the manufacture of modern smokeless powder.
i call bullshit on how hard it is. i made a batch when i was 16 with a car battery i took from the dumpster at autozone, some stump remover, and cotton balls. i made a double barrel bluderbuss with it, and nearly blew myself up, but that was becuase i was being stupid and used pipe end caps instead of putting a bolt at the end
Nail gun blanks
>priming compound itself
Matchsticks.
smokeless powder would be dangerous and tedious, but feasible.
Primer caps are made out of substances that handling during manufacture can just fricking explode.
>doesn't give a link
niqqa
mcmaster and digikey will both sell you 1 of most things, it just usually ends up being as expensive as buying the whole roll/pallet/whatever
't give a link
>niqqa
here you lazy frick
https://archive.org/details/gunitsdevelopmen00greerich/page/n13/mode/1up
the book is a 100 years old you could find for free
It's frustrating to find that 90% of the diy gun books just use surplus sten mags because EVERYONE can get those. Then you discover that the materials they suggest just don't seem to exist, seamless tube and rectangle tube of certain dimensions just aren't a thing.
Whenever people shit on 3d printed guns because "you can just DIY it from home depot" what they forget to mention is that they bought a demilled gun, a parts kit and a bunch of magazines for it and basically just need to weld a piece of pipe to it and call yourself John Moses Browning for making a gun.
>Then you discover that the materials they suggest just don't seem to exist, seamless tube and rectangle tube of certain dimensions just aren't a thing.
That's almost always a disconnect between the average DIYer, who shops at retail stores and is completely ignorant of industrial sizing or where to get it, and an experienced fabricator, who buys from industrial suppliers who actually do carry things like seamless tube. A hardware store or a home center like Home Depot, Lowe's, etc, will not have this stuff. Find an industrial steel yard, they will be in the bad part of town surrounded by welding & fabrication shops. Those kinds of places will have it. An alternative to find specialty vendors, like those selling seamless tubing for guys building race car chassis.
I'm sure they do exist, just finding suppliers without either making a hundred phone calls (because they dont have functioning websites) or going to see them, I aint got the time or patience to deal with that shit, it's the 21st century, have a fricking website. Half the industrial suppliers I've ever dealt with also had the worst customer service with the last one being that I walked in, stood at the desk while 3 staff just sat in the back on computers talking to each other and pretending I didn't exist. I figured there must be a dedicated counter person but eventually one of them decided to ask if I had been served.
Then there's the issue with industrial suppliers requiring a business account and only doing minimum order values or only supplying in 5 meter lengths, it's like living in the stone age with these fricks. No wonder people just cut out the middleman and buy shit from aliexpress.
Oh yeah, bad customer service is par for the course. It's how they filter out the casuals who waste their time with three million questions. I can't say I've ever had any require a business account though. The minimum order lengths is a pain in the ass but I understand why the do it. Industrial customers only want full sticks, and they're not going to order a $200 piece of metal just to sell you two feet and then keep the rest in eternal inventory. So if you don't need a full stick you need to either find a place that happens to have a drop already or overpay from specialty places who sell shorter pieces.
Thankfully he online suppliers are getting better, OnlineMetals has improved tremendously from their early days. McMaster Carr is pretty good for some things but they're overpriced for others and there's also a lot they don't stock, but they're much better than the local hardware or home store.
Yeah online stores are getting better but a majority of them here barely have more than a page that tells you the type of products they sell let alone an itemised list with specs. My real pet peeve from these industrial suppliers is when they have a full product page, all the info and then you have to call to make an order. I will gonout of my way to find a supplier based in the present and only go to shitc**ts like that as a last resort.
>is that a guy at the desk? Wtf no one ever comes in here
>I want 1m of steel tube
>we only make it in 5m strips
>can I have one 5m strip
>we usually sell it in bulk packs of 100, we don't really want to break a pack open for you
>Reee why is your customer service bad!
Funny but no, not how it happened.
You gays have seriously never heard of McMaster?
You gay, ever heard of countries outside of North America?
No, because they're completely irrelevant
Fricking moron.
I can't hear you, did your weak ass European b***h voice say something?
Speak up
Fricking moron.
People like you are the reason your country is shitting itself to death right now.
Damn you should post the guns you've made
Ah, a fed agent provocateur, that explains a lot.
There is nothing illegal about making guns in the United States, it's 100% legal
I am aware, but that tripgay glows.
>tripgay glows.
no he is just moronic he goes to every PrepHole guns thread and says the alot moronic shit.
To be fair he's the only person who ever posts guns he's made, everyone else just larps
Ignore cummy paws, all he does is try to stir shit for amusement.
He is also a furry and a shit welder who looks up archived posts to feign oldgay status. I need to find that image showing the percentage of spamming he does. It represents 20% of /k/ when fluffy doesnt put out.
ive seen him post his welds before and they looked good to me, im not a welder though
did he frick your dog or something
No he just talks too much.
Checked. Now turn your trip back on you little attention prostitute, you.
>good welds
>furhomosexual
wtf i love [PLEBSPOTTERS] BigC !PAWS/PFILI now
Why do you frick dogs, satan?
>go to any university
>get chummy with their engineering club(s) like baja or or other motorsports teams, robotics, welders, whatever
>ask where they buy their shit
>it'll probably be somewhere cheap that deals in low volume because they're a student and thus likely poor and only working with low volumes
>whatever site they use probably sells everything else like how you can get coffee pods on digikey and shelving from mcmaster and hunting supplies from uline and shit
simple as
Yes, I mentioned them
. I've been shopping from them for nearly 25 years now. For raw materials like steel their prices are terrible compared to local places though, and there's a lot they don't stock. They are handy if you need small pieces though. I'd argue that most of the utility from McMaster is hardware. Nuts, bolts, pipe fittings, etc.
Brass is easier than most of what you've listed, its a very simple job to turn brass on a lathe, much easier than any other machining on the gun. Bottlenecked cartridges can be necked down with dies which you can also make on said lathe. If you want to read more about it go check out Handloader's Manual of Cartridge Conversions by Donnelly and Designing and Forming Custom Cartridges by Howell.
>smokless powder
VERY hard. Easily the biggest challenge you mentioned by far. The chemicals are dangerous and the processes are complicated. For starters, smokeless powder isn't actually "powder". It's specially shaped but tiny grains, often times hollow. Imagine pasta shapes but so small they look like powder. Black powder isn't hard to make. Neither are some kinds of early semi-smokeless powder.
Primers? The cups are easy to make using tools you'd make with your lathe. The hard part is the priming compound inside. Corrosive formulations aren't too hard, modern non-corrosive primers would be a b***h.
Also, read this. One of the reasons I constantly shill this book is because among the fricktastic amount of information it contains are gems like:
-formulations for primers
-formulations for early forms of powder
-why smokeless powder is dangerous AF to DIY
-how primers were made
-how brass was made
-how guns were made
-how explosive bullets were made
...and a lot more, all without modern machinery. It's out of copyright so you can read it free online.
Blow back guns can be made pretty easily, you can even kludge together functional magazines from junk but it's much harder. Ammo to make it reliably cycle is nearly impossible without having some standardized base components you can use, like blanks or ramset cartridges. If you need to produce your own powder a black powder gun is your best bet.
https://twitter.com/SuckBoyTony1
https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-PrintableFramesReceivers:9
https://twitter.com/Wild_Arms_RandD
Are we talking some hypothetical scenario where basic everything has collapsed, or is this a realistic scenario in today's world with internet and such available? Because if the latter, making a gun from scratch now has never been easier, including priming compound and nitrocellulose. Obviously it is not foolproof and requires actual basic skills and comprehension, but it's doable now more than ever.
>or is this a realistic scenario in today's world with internet and such available?
This. I'm talking about the modern world, except a world where you can't legally get your hands on any gun parts, so you have to make everything yourself.
Yeah, assuming you still have access to raw materials and machining tools or a 3D printer and basic hand and power tools, this is definitely a lot easier today than before. As others have mentioned, the priming compounds and smokeless powder would be the most challenging. Brass if you wanted accurate perfect ones would be difficult but doable, and there's movement towards plastic cased ammo (which you can't reload obviously) made with 3D printers too.
Think about it, even if you don't go with modern or mid century firearm designs, some random guy in his own home lab made an electrically ignited electronically actuated blunderbuss and killed Shinto Abe with it.
>Shinto Abe
Shinzo*
sorry Abe-kun.
Sounds like a comfy time at home.
Make a flintlock. Black powder is easy
The fgc9 does exactly this. Doing it in 5.56 would be a lot harder, especially the barrel, bolt assembly and heat treatment
Making ammo is by far a bigger bottleneck than the gun. Manufacturing smokeless powder and primers on any meaningful scale is effectively impossible for a random individual without access to expensive specialized machinery and raw material.
The smart way is make IEDs, then harvest enemy weapons and ammo. That method is reliable and proven.
You would be stupid to do so because power is in your peer group not yourself. Your thinking is childish. Join whoever is going to win then make yourself value. The worst thing one can do in war is pick the losing side. Work for the side who will arm you in a capacity which will leave you well protected. If you dislike them you can always go Blue on Blue, which any dedicated person would do, but you won't be that dedicated.
Can black powder be ignited electrically? Black powder is shit for autoloaders but still works if you design around it, and primers could be avoided if you can use a piezo-electric crystal to ignite the powder charge
>Can black powder be ignited electrically?
Yes, any spark will set it off, electricity included.
>Autoloaders
Now things get more complicated. You have two major problems. First, you need a way to stop the powder fouling from short-circuiting your spark gap so you actually get a spark after the first couple cartridges are fired. Second, you need a way to get the spark into the cartridge without the powder falling out everywhere. Primers are not that difficult, the only tricky thing about primers is making them non-corrosive, but if we're talking black powder that's a moot point.
From the little bit of research I’ve done you need a sustained arc to ignite a powder charge, an instant short spark like that from a piezo won’t cut it. I think piezo-fired cartridges are a really promising idea from a commercial standpoint, you could completely replace the firing pin with an electrical contact, and the FCG wouldn’t even need to directly interface with the bolt, at least not from behind
>an instant short spark like that from a piezo won’t cut it.
I've used a piezo gas grill igniter to set it off before, doing amateur movie effects. Put a little powder on a piece of foil, the foil is one of the electrodes, the other electrode is just a piece of wire bent to point down over the powder. I've also used little bits of nichrome wire heated up with a battery, or the igniters used for model rockets. Those have the disadvantage of having a slight lag time before the powder ignites and it requires battery power.
> you could completely replace the firing pin with an electrical contact
Why would we want to trade off something that works reliably for something that sounds highly sketchy once fouling or moisture gets involved? What is the benefit you are seeking?
The benefit of a piezo electric firing mechanism is you’re cutting out a number of small moving parts with a system of fixed conductors. You’re removing mechanical intricacy and don’t need to replace it with an active powered system. You’re still utilizing the mechanical energy of the gun’s recoil, no batteries are required, but it gives you almost all of the benefits of an electric firing system
The moving parts you are removing are generally extremely reliable. It's like you're going out of your way to "fix" a problem that doesn't really exist in the first place.
>almost all of the benefits of an electric firing system
Which are? We're not getting the low lock time that could theoretically happen if we got rid of a striker or hammer, and we can't vary the rate of fire electronically. What advantages are there exactly?
Nta and I am no gunsmith, but in the automotive industry we can do everything we can do now with cars mechanically with things such as injectors or sparkplugs for instance. Pretty precise too. But we use electronics because what you can do with intricate mechanical engineering with stuff like injectors or sparkplugs can be done far easier, cheaper and adjusted more precisely with electronics. I would be willing to bet an electronic ignition system would just be as effective when applied to black powder firearms in that regard. But the real question is if you are going to make something like a black powder gun you might aswell stay faithful to the orignal design because if you are going to optamise such a design you might as well choose a gun design which is already far more practical than black powder to begin with.
Electrically fired black powder guns would be done to solve issues with sourcing ammo for euros. In a commercial design, the same principles could be applied to more traditional firearms
A fire control group needs to interface with a bcg in two ways. The bcg needs to wiener the hammer while cycling and block it when out of battery, and needs to align the firing ping to the hammer at the rear of the bolt to fire. With a piezo-electric FCG, the hammer does not need to align itself with any firing pin. It can be placed anywhere that facilitates wienering the hammer with the BCG. Through a conductive contact, the FCG can fire the round from any location in the gun without transferring force directly from the hammer to the firing pin. You’ve replaced an intricate mechanical system with a simple electric circuit that requires no active power source, no micro controllers, no bullshit. It’s basically a direct improvement, provided you can electrically isolate the bolt from outside charges
The practical advantage of this in terms of design is that you can reduce the length and complexity of the bolt to allow for more compact designs, and you have the freedom to place the fire control group in front of the bolt to facilitate bullpup designs that don’t require mechanical linkages. Since we’re moving the actual fire control group, the safety/fire selector move with it, eliminating ergonomic issues. You would still need to interface with the bcg in some way to wiener the hammer, but this would be a simple design constraint to work with
>With a piezo-electric FCG, the hammer does not need to align itself with any firing pin
This "alignment" is nothingburger though, and the piezo hammer still has to hit the right place on the cartridge. There's nothing complex about the mechanics here---people have been doing this for way over a century now--and you want to introduce the unknown variable of the piezo igniter? this seems like a poor trade-off.
>Through a conductive contact, the FCG can fire the round from any location in the gun without transferring force directly from the hammer to the firing pin.
Firing cartridge electrically like that would have some advantages, but it carries the HUGE disadvantage of requiring a good electrical contact.
>s that you can reduce the length and complexity of the bolt
That's not really a problem though, how on earth is is worth the cost of the unknown, unproven, piezo system?
A piezoelectric crystal essentially transfers mechanical energy into voltage. A piezoelectric crystal located in the fire control group would allow you to generate a charge locally at the FCG, which can be transmitted back to the bolt face by a conductive contact when in battery. This is why there’s an advantage, if you used an electrically activated primer, that piezo electric crystal can be placed anywhere in the gun, and efficiently transfer energy imparted onto it directly to the cartridge without requiring a direct mechanical connection like a firing pin. I’m not suggesting placing a piezo electric crystal in the bcg or in the primer, but rather in the FCG
Furthermore, fouling could be largely avoided if the placement of the electrical contact to the FCG is away from the breachface, such as a guide rod on the front of the bolt. The largest challenge i see would be of material development. You’d need to develop a primer which is electrically activated, yet safe for storage and safe from static electricity imparted externally on the gun. Keeping it safe would be the biggest challenge to overcome, but if it works you’d greatly reduce the cost and complexity of the gun, have the freedom to place the FCG anywhere in the design without requiring mechanical linkages, and have a great deal of reduced machining requiring on the BCG. A firing pin needs more than just a hole, it needs mechanical systems to prevent out of battery discharges, it needs an additional spring which will wear out, and it needs retaining pins. Each one of these is more parts and more machining operations on the bolt
>Furthermore, fouling could be largely avoided if the placement of the electrical contact to the FCG is away from the breachface, such as a guide rod on the front of the bolt
The contact has to be somewhere in the chamber or bolt face so it can physically contact the primer. Fouling will always be a problem in any of those areas.
Ah, this is actually something I had discounted, was the electrical contact from BCG to primer. I could see fouling being a pretty big issue there, but im curious to the extent that it would be. I really want to frick with this idea practically at some point but I don’t have access to a machine shop
>A piezoelectric crystal essentially transfers mechanical energy into voltage
Yes, I'm aware of how they work.
>which can be transmitted back to the bolt face by a conductive contact
This is a terrible, terrible, disadvantage. Why are you ignoring it?
>without requiring a direct mechanical connection like a firing pin
But we now require an electrical connection instead, which is much much worse.
>I’m not suggesting placing a piezo electric crystal in the bcg or in the primer, but rather in the FCG
Thank you for clarifying, I thought you were flip-flopping between in the primer and in the BCG. But anyway, I understand where you're coming from now, I'm just curious why you feel these relatively minor benefits of being able to more easily re-arrange FCG components are worth introducing the major reliability concern of maintaining a reliable electrical contact around fouling, moisture, etc.
An electrical contact can be as simple as a conductive bar that slots into a receiving conductor on the FCG under spring pressure while the gun is in battery. You wouldn’t want wires or anything, you’d want a robust conductive rail to contact the FCG
Sure. Now how do we stop fouling, which is electrically conductive, from shorting it out? How do we keep it working when Private McTardface soaks it with a nice conductive mixture of CLP and whatever crap was in his barrel? How do we keep it working when it's raining and water gets on it?
>You wouldn’t want wires or anything, you’d want a robust conductive rail to contact the FCG
...are you suggesting that there's an additional moving contact here? That's another huge potential for problems. If a contact has to slide along the rail you have to worry about that contact too: If there's a brush or a spring or something making sliding contact like in a potentiometer that can wear out, get contaminated with fouling, etc.
The contact would be fixed to the BCG
I can sketch something when I get home
Heres a bullshit little sketch of what im talking about. the fire control group would have a contact that the BCG slides into, which would complete a circuit between the FCG and the primer. One thing that occured to me sketching this is that youd still need the bolt to interact with the hammer to wiener the hammer, so you could just place the piezo crystal on the front of the bolt and have the hammer strike that
afaik black powder is minimally conductive but an open spark would probably work if you could get it through the powder and it was super fine but it'd probably be difficult and unreliable. even potato cannons are known for failing to fire a lot and those use gas
sparks like ignited stuff off of flint or metal or whatever aren't the same as electrical sparks. anyone who has owned an older gas stove can tell you how unreliable electric ignition is
yes, of course. its not forbidden to own the means of producing weapons - and plans and instructions are available online
it would be quite an expensive undertaking, compared to simply getting a license and buying a gun
https://www.gordsghostguns.com
EDM drilling is key for home made barrels. They just need to become more easily available and a bit further developed.
>EDM drilling is key for homemade barrels.
why not just ECM it?
https://odysee.com/@TheGatalog-Guides_Tutorials:b/DIY-ECM-Barrelmaking:d
Because ECM is for rifling, EDM for drilling.
>Because ECM is for rifling, EDM for drilling.
>rifling
>drilling
well, I'm fricking moronic or blind.
Zero tolerance EDM machining anon, though i doubt you need it that perfect. Metal hardness doesn't matter so you can cut steel or titanium without a several ton cnc.
If you allow yourself to use factory made bullets, you could probably do a variant on this:
Whatever you do, the accuracy is gonna suck, so you should probably stick with short-range, high-velocity
Theres plenty of good blackpowder recepies online, make small paper packages of those with a bullet in front, stick em in a pipe with a fuse at the end, and you've got a handheld canon
>handheld canon
>canon
The Bible?
Looks like your photography days are over.