07-19-2016, 01:01 PM
I had my first foray into gunsmithing this past weekend.
A friend of mine promised to find a responsible owner for a tiny WWII-era, French-made .22 semi-auto pistol belonging to the recently-deceased father (he was a jeweler in Oakland in the Bad Old Days) of a friend of my friend. Turns out I'm responsible... who knew?
Long story short, I took possession of the pistol last weekend, and quickly discovered that it was in need of some loving. The bluing was worn off in numerous places, the clip was both not feeding all the way to the top, and sticking in the grip, and most of all, it was missing the extractor.
The clip was pretty easy to fix: it badly needed cleaning and a little autobody work. The follower was hanging up on one of the cutouts in the body - this was just a matter of tucking some flanges on the follower a little further under. The clip body had some dents that needed to be removed, and I found a correctly-sized mandrel in my junk box and tapped them out with a tiny ball peen hammer.
I did a little research on the pistol and found just a single site offering spare parts, but none for this particular pistol. Perusing their exploded views, I saw a similar model which showed the general arrangement of the extractor. It rocks on a pin, and has a tiny spring which allows the the extractor to ride over the rim before snapping into place between the rim and barrel.
Regarding the spring, I couldn't find any springs small enough on McMaster or Small Parts, so I bought a roll of .016" music wire and will have a go at winding tiny springs. I've done some larger springs, and find it a very interesting process. BTW, if anyone needs .016" music wire, I have enough for 10 lifetimes. 366 feet, and I probably only need 2 feet, including experiments.
So, I made a couple of 16-gauge sheet metal patterns and verified that they worked before moving to O1 steel. There were only two machining ops: reducing the 1/8" thickness to 2.75mm, and drilling a 2.5 mm hole for the rocker pin. The rest was done entirely by hand with files. O1 sure files nice. The resulting part is less than 1" long, and about 1/4" wide.
For some reason, it took quite a bit of tinkering with the full-width extractor to make it work correctly, but triumphed in the end. Next step was heat treatment. I tried twice to use a stainless foil packet to protect the part from scale during heating, but quickly discovered that an Oxy/Acetylene flame burnt right through the foil, and that a MAPP gas torch wouldn't get the part inside hot enough. Perhaps two MAPP gas torches would do the trick. Anyway, it was a small part, so I just dangled it in front of the MAPP gas torch nekid and got'r dunn. The resulting scale polished off easily enough on a diamond lap. I carefully annealed it over a very low torch flame.
A totally new technology in my shop is cold bluing. I bought some Birchwood Casey Super Blue off Amazon. I have to say, not much in the way of instructions with that package. I'm not sure what I've done wrong with this product, but it's not producing a very deep blue, despite 5 or 6 treatments. And, despite cleaning the blued part at the end with both alcohol and acetone, and wiping it down liberally with WD40, it has a light coating of rust on it after just a day. I think my next step will be heating the parts to increase the reactivity of the chemistry.
Perhaps today I'll look at taking some pix.
A friend of mine promised to find a responsible owner for a tiny WWII-era, French-made .22 semi-auto pistol belonging to the recently-deceased father (he was a jeweler in Oakland in the Bad Old Days) of a friend of my friend. Turns out I'm responsible... who knew?
Long story short, I took possession of the pistol last weekend, and quickly discovered that it was in need of some loving. The bluing was worn off in numerous places, the clip was both not feeding all the way to the top, and sticking in the grip, and most of all, it was missing the extractor.
The clip was pretty easy to fix: it badly needed cleaning and a little autobody work. The follower was hanging up on one of the cutouts in the body - this was just a matter of tucking some flanges on the follower a little further under. The clip body had some dents that needed to be removed, and I found a correctly-sized mandrel in my junk box and tapped them out with a tiny ball peen hammer.
I did a little research on the pistol and found just a single site offering spare parts, but none for this particular pistol. Perusing their exploded views, I saw a similar model which showed the general arrangement of the extractor. It rocks on a pin, and has a tiny spring which allows the the extractor to ride over the rim before snapping into place between the rim and barrel.
Regarding the spring, I couldn't find any springs small enough on McMaster or Small Parts, so I bought a roll of .016" music wire and will have a go at winding tiny springs. I've done some larger springs, and find it a very interesting process. BTW, if anyone needs .016" music wire, I have enough for 10 lifetimes. 366 feet, and I probably only need 2 feet, including experiments.
So, I made a couple of 16-gauge sheet metal patterns and verified that they worked before moving to O1 steel. There were only two machining ops: reducing the 1/8" thickness to 2.75mm, and drilling a 2.5 mm hole for the rocker pin. The rest was done entirely by hand with files. O1 sure files nice. The resulting part is less than 1" long, and about 1/4" wide.
For some reason, it took quite a bit of tinkering with the full-width extractor to make it work correctly, but triumphed in the end. Next step was heat treatment. I tried twice to use a stainless foil packet to protect the part from scale during heating, but quickly discovered that an Oxy/Acetylene flame burnt right through the foil, and that a MAPP gas torch wouldn't get the part inside hot enough. Perhaps two MAPP gas torches would do the trick. Anyway, it was a small part, so I just dangled it in front of the MAPP gas torch nekid and got'r dunn. The resulting scale polished off easily enough on a diamond lap. I carefully annealed it over a very low torch flame.
A totally new technology in my shop is cold bluing. I bought some Birchwood Casey Super Blue off Amazon. I have to say, not much in the way of instructions with that package. I'm not sure what I've done wrong with this product, but it's not producing a very deep blue, despite 5 or 6 treatments. And, despite cleaning the blued part at the end with both alcohol and acetone, and wiping it down liberally with WD40, it has a light coating of rust on it after just a day. I think my next step will be heating the parts to increase the reactivity of the chemistry.
Perhaps today I'll look at taking some pix.
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