strayastrelok, I feel your pain brother. I have investigated the possibilities of home made firearms from scratch, and I have discovered what will not work, as well as a possible solution that I am developing that might work.
First what needs to be understood is the most difficult part of any firearm: the barrel. The barrel receives the most heat and pressure out of any part of the gun. Furthermore barrels are the most difficult part of the firearm to manufacture. While many anons think that creating barrels is easy, because creating rifling is easy, they mistakenly skip the most difficult part of the process, which is drilling the hole to make the barrel. Using a standard twist drill will NOT create a barrel. Instead the drill will walk (meaning the tip will begin to wander toward the side) as soon as it gets deeper into the material than 3x the diameter. Drilling barrels is difficult because it normally requires high pressure coolant pumping and a specialized gun drill to cut a straight hole. Your options for barrels are as follows:
A. taking an existing barrel and re-purposing it
B. using an existing steel tube or pipe as a barrel
C. casting a barrel
D. drilling a hole through a steel rod to make a new barrel
Let us examine what the limitations are of each of these options.
Barrels can be easily regulated. Any existing barrel manufacturer can easily be pressured by the government into selling their product only to the appropriate agencies, cutting you off from a supply.
While these tubes are easy to acquire and inexpensive, the problem is that their pre-existing sizes and limited materials available cut down your choices for firearms. You are effectively limited to shotguns or pistols.
If you were to cast a barrel, you would inevitably end up with impurities in it. This is because any sort of backyard means of heating steel to a liquid state for pouring would introduce extra carbon and oxygen into it. Both would weaken the steel, potentially leading to premature failure.
Conventionally, this is expensive. You would first need a long enough lathe in order to set up your operation, then you would need to add a high pressure coolant setup. Depending on how long a barrel you want, you are looking at a cost of about $10,000 for tooling.
However, I believe there is an alternative method. EDM (Electrical Discharge Machining) is a means of cutting metal by using sparks. It can be used to cut with HIGH PRECISION through any material with little vibration. I am personally working on a project to make a barrel by creating an EDM gun drill. I plan to do this by creating a pulse EDM machine (look up Ben Flemming, he designed his own) and connecting it to a RAMPS 1.4 3d printer board, and programming it to drill the hole.
EDM is a slow process, and in the production business, speed is king, even if it costs more in tooling. Furthermore EDM isn't a well known process.
I work full time and go to school, and I suck at electronics. Unfortunately the schematic for Fleming's EDM machine is not exactly easy for newbies to understand, so it will be some time before I have a strong enough grasp of what needs to be modified to make it compatible with the other components I plan to merge with it. If any streloks know electronics and want to help, I can provide contact info.
