MachIVshooter
Member
If you sell it is it going to be half price?
Half of what a decked out Stoner SR25 cost, maybe. lol.
In all seriousness, by the time I'm done, I'll have probably invested >200 hours and dropped at least $500 on materials and new/replacement tooling.
The good news is I did score a barrel. It's a used .17-222 tube, but I won it for $50 shipped on fleabay. Now I just have to decide if I'm buying a $75 PTG reamer or reprofiling one of the 50 or so reamers I got in a lot a couple months back. Even if I do buy the new reamer, I'll still come out well ahead of the alternative $225 option for a chambered Clark barrel.
Of course, I'm still waiting on a reply from ATF FTB, and that's likely at least a month away yet, so there's not a huge rush to finish out the last half dozen parts.
I should have the 5/16-40 tap and die for the barrel and flash hider later this week, though. Perfect scale would, of course, be 1/4-56, but I don't want to trim it down that far. With a .172" bore, there would be less than 0.025" thickness, and that's getting a little thin for comfort, even with a rimfire. 5/16-40 will leave about 0.055".
You're not even a machinist by trade
Nope. Mechanic since age 16. Did carpentry for a year and a half before that, but it wasn't my calling, and I never liked having to travel to new destinations all the time for work.
It is a natural progression, I think. Going from fixing mechanical things to making mechanical things isn't exactly a quantum leap. The relationships between mechanical parts have always just made sense to me, and though I lack a formal education beyond 9th grade, I have never had trouble understanding and applying practical math-algebra, geometry and trig.
Also always liked metals, despite my father having been a woodworker and custom cabinet maker. And my fascination with guns, though nurtured by him, far exceeded his own. He died when I was 11, though, and mom & stepdad were antis. Solution? Build one! My first gun was a muzzle loader made from a pellet gun barrel, some cap gun parts and an aluminum frame. I was lucky to survive that one, being as I used smokeless power in it, and bullets were a bit heavy, swaged down from .22 LR pills (the powder was from the .22 LR cartridges). Metallurgy and pressures I just didn't have a solid grasp on at 11/12 years old. Eventually the brazed in nipple blew out of it; the hammer deflected it away from me, but I acquired a healthy dose of fear, and decided to move into cartridge firing guns. Next one was all steel (thanks, metal shop class!), and fired .22 LR from a hinged barrel made of 1/2" hexagonal steel stock. Crude trigger mechanism held back the equally crude striker, but it did work. That one landed me in jail a couple years later; I was lucky to have only been charged with minor in possession of a handgun, since it was a smooth bore pistol. I guess they figured a 13-15 year old kid probably wasn't familiar with NFA laws (I wasn't). Fortunately it was a deferred adjudication, and I did stop building guns until I came of age.
Anyhow, since I didn't manage to kill myself or lose my gun rights with my adolescent ventures, I am lucky enough today to have the equipment and the knowledge/resources to get it done right!