I Bow to you sir!!!!
I was a tool & die maker for years in real life, a AMU gunsmith in the Army, and there is no way, no day I could have done what you have done in such a short time.
Or, even at all?
I appreciate the accolade, though I'm certain with your history this would not have been that difficult for you. Admittedly, the pace has been rapid, and that is one of my problems; I become impatient when I feel that things are moving too slowly. The result is that many of my personal projects are very good, but not perfect.
I could have taken the time to map out the contours, but I quickly bore of drawing and planning, so a lot of it gets eyeballed. As such, the upper profile is not perfectly round on the sides. I should have drawn out the angles and distances on the FA cuts in the bolt, but once again, it was late, I was tired, and my eyes are pretty good. Except that on the furthest forward two cuts, I misjudged my angle, so they are deeper than the remainder.
I could produce these kinds of things with zero flaws if I took more time to draw them out, carefully measure and square everything up, put more thought into selecting cutters, take lighter cuts, etc.
I'm decent at technical drawing, and I'll sit down and do it when something is being made from scratch. But when I am duplicating or scaling a part that I can reverse engineer, my "blueprints" tend to look like this:
I'll have the part, a digital caliper and a calculator sitting there as well, taking measurements as I go, doing math on the fly. Sometimes I make errors, though-especially working on these personal projects into the wee hours.
Being both fastidious and impatient is a dichotomy of personality traits I've struggled with my entire life, very difficult to reconcile.
