I wouldn’t have thought mandrills would put up with that. Or have any reason to be in Colonial Williamsburg, for that matter.
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Funny, all those colors DO show up when you’re forging steel!
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Well, it was necessary to define exactly when a lump of metal crosses the line to become a gun. each type of receiver has a certain point where ATF makes that distinction. For some firearms, the 80% receiver would still be super challenging to make function. The primary legitimate market for those is for military arms collectors or reenactors. If you have an 80% or dummy receiver, you can put the rest of the parts on it and have something that looks and feels like the original gun, but cannot easily be made to fire. I put a lot of MG34 and MP40 parts kits onto matched dummy receivers for collectors, or sometimes descendants of vets who brought the guns home, and want to keep them and be legal doing so.
Sounds like you do fascinating work. That Thomson I handled had been bandsawed through the receiver, I was told it was a standard way to “decommission” it that was not recoverable.
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Yes, I am pretty much obsessed with making interesting things. Our family business is restoring and conserving mostly military artifacts, from 300 year old swords to WW2 artillery. Also uniforms and optics. And cold war era ejection seats. I am actually not very keen on modern guns. Almost everything I own is pre 1945. I will sometimes repair modern guns, but only as a favor for friends or relatives.
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bandsawing in two places is an old method of demilling. These days, they usually have to do three or more cuts with a torch. Right after WW2, they sometimes just poured lead into the barrel. That primarily kept kids from loading them and having an incident, while letting you keep war trophies on the mantle.
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Awesome, coulda been me in different life, I design & machine gadgets for the stage. The only major weapon I own is a Union Army saber my father acquired somehow, made in Trenton in 1864. Not very valuable as I understand it, they made a zillion, but way cool.
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Funny how it’s activism when someone is working to support a right that you like, but feteshism when someone supports a right that you don’t like.
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It is never about the monetary value for me. To me, there is a magic about things that were right there, when history was happening. Some of the things that we have would probably be pretty disturbing to people. I do not have a morbid or unhealthy obsession with that sort of thing, although I know some collectors who, in my judgement, have collections that make me uncomfortable. As an example of this, some people collect war trophies made from human remains, primarily from the WW2 Pacific theatre. Not just the “gold teeth” thing, but fighting knives with handles made from thigh bones, or scrimshawed skulls with the different island names all over them. That sort of thing makes my spider sense go off.
Probably the thing I find that resonates most with me is a Japanese Officer’s pocket watch from Saipan. The officer was in a bunker that was assaulted by US troops on 6th July, 1944. An artillery shell detonated right inside the cave’s entrance. It was a natural cave that had been enlarged to four claustrophobic levels, with an opening on level ground, covered with corrugated steel and brush. Very little is left of the watch. The case is bent and twisted, and the outline of gears and other parts are still visible where they impacted the back of the case. There is no question at all that the officer met his end when the watch did. That watch is one of the things that I let kids touch when I give talks about the inhumanity of war at schools. It makes an impact. I will look for an image of the watch and add it to this comment.
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…you don’t see something weird about “I don’t mind starving or freezing to death as long as people can own their near-miltary grade weapons because of a relatively modern, never intended interpretation of the second amendment?”
I mean I’m not for a gun ban (especially with a Trump presidency potentially on the horizon) but that really is taking it into Fetishism (in the original sense of the word) territory.
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But when you are finished, you’d have one kick-ass armor-plated mandrill.
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You have paraphrased to suit your interpretation and reinforce the beliefs you already hold.
Being willing to go through hardship in an effort to ensure that people’s rights are maintained is activism. You may consider me a first amendment fetishist if you like, as I would go through exactly what he said if I knew that it would help to continue everyone’s right to free speech.
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That looks pretty, and expensive. I have a little Swiss lathe, but it is analog.
I saw the headline and wondered, is this guy making actual assault rifles, as in fully-automatic machine guns, or is he making “assault” rifles, as in “hunting rifles but they look kinda scary”?
Turns out it’s the latter.
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You know very well that the “right” to a gun is not accepted by all but a tiny minority.
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That is factually incorrect in the US.
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Are they shipping yet? I just might need to sneak this onto the boss’s next budget.
Danger depends on how easy it is get the ammo. I don’t mind if they build GAU-8 Avengers so long as they don’t ammo.
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