WECSOG Auto Mag

You guys with the surface grinders, harrumph.

Every time I find one in my price range, it's either in New York of California, and shipping is the deal-breaker. I found recently in an adjacent state, but adding up the numbers didn't work out there, either. $175 or so in gas, $75-$150 for a wrecker to load it, the same to get it unloaded at home. Arrgh.

Of course, if I hadn't blown so much money on shiny collectible Auto Mag bits, I might have been able to afford it...


Sometimes just bringing a problem up for discussion stimulates the problem-solving process. I think the new "Plan A" might be:

a) drill and ream the ID
b) gnaw the rough outline of the ring with the mill
c) make a pair of hardened steel buttons to bolt through the ring
d) finish the OD with files

That's basically how some of the 1911 beavertail fixtures work. To reshape the back of the frame to match the radius of the beavertail, you attach a hardened button to each side of the frame and file it to shape; the file slides over the hardened buttons.

I'd have to knock the teeth off one side of a triangular file to reach in the corners without digging into the top of the frame, the rest would be just ordinary filing. I could probably do it in a couple of hours, and all it would cost is a bit of O-1 or 6820 and a file.

"I love it when a plan comes together!"

That's the plan. Frame, bolt, cocking piece, barrel, and receiver. I already bought most of the small pieces from Walter Sanford's site or "Brian's Surplus" off Gunbroker. That's $1400 in an ordinary sandwich bag laying on my desk, by the way... between that and what I've put out for tooling upgrades so far, I could simply have bought one through Gunbroker and warned my friendly FFL to expect an incoming arrival, and not to leave any drool marks on it.

I'll be documenting my progress from time to time, but like I said in the first post, I expect it to take a while.

This is entirely a hobby project. Since I'm working within the limits of the equipment in my garage and the entire cost is coming out of my hobby/entertainment budget (so far, overspent out to 2019 or so...), I'll be doing many things in a tedious and roundabout fashion instead of the way a proper production shop would approach each operation.

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Since someone is bound to ask, yes it's legal to build a gun, as long as it's not something that's prohibited by Federal or local law. The details are available at atf.gov. My state has no restrictions on building.

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Again, this is a hobby project, like "why are you making all that fiberglass mess to build a boat? Why don't you just rent one down at the lake?" Except guns are way cheaper than boats, of course.

TRX302 wrote:   This is entirely a hobby project. Since I'm working within the limits of the equipment in my garage and the entire cost is coming out of my hobby/entertainment budget (so far, overspent out to 2019 or so...), I'll be doing many things in a tedious and roundabout fashion instead of the way a proper production shop would approach each operation.

Sometimes I think the file-and-chisel guys are onto something. One of them could probably whittle out a working firearm from bar stock while I'm still tooling up.

It's kind of funny, a recurrent thread on the machinist forums is something like: "I don't actually make anything, I just make tools to make other tools..."

Lee,