Making your own.....one way or another.

[ThreeHundredBlackout]

To my understanding it is completely legal to make a firearm for personal use, ofcourse we have heard that a thousand times if we've heard it once........

But it blows my mind to think how bad the dumb piliticians have it for 3d printed parts.

I've been researching it here and there and it seems unless you have a real sweet setup(printer and good strong plastic) for 3d then its just a waste of time.........

But with that said these anti-freedom donkeys have it bad for these "ghost guns" !

I think its great that they want to do the 3d thing, although id rather just have a metal part for strength.

It gets real interesting that the 2A and 1A are so closely knitted when it comes to the 3d thing and just sharing files alone has these morons so caught up against it...........but what fight do they think they posess legally, being that it is perfectly legal to do as is milling out an 80% or making one from the ground up for personal use ?

I Love Freedom and will enjoy it while i have it !

(That said deer season isn't too far off and last years is almost gone now!)

What are your thoughts and known facts on the making your own fellas ?

If there is another specific thread on this someone chime in.......just got to thinking with all the dumb headlines i see on these big wigs getting bent out of shape on the matter.

[alamo5000]

I have thought a lot on the 3D thing and it's yet another evolution in the manufacture of firearms. There might be 10,000 people who really get into it, but out of those 10,000 we can get and gain some serious firearms innovations.

Ballistics is getting turned on it's head. The original old school use of straight forward G1 and G7 are almost if not completely irrelevant when you get into the ELR world. The modern ballistics programs took these concepts and already added +10 to them accounting for both extra distance and many other calculateable (is that even a word?) factors. Being able to pinpoint shot placement to 4000 yards with a phone app...really now? The use of various materials for rounds or firearms is just the tip of the iceberg. They are experimenting with injection molded projectiles that have extreme ballistic and terminal traits.

20 years from now a soldier could carry twice the ammo, shoot effectively twice as far, and be able to take out tanks or other small vehicles with stuff he can run around the battle field with on his back. Now they can shoot terrorists off the backs of camels from 2 miles out. 20 years ago that was a fairy tale dream.

Currently they are working on X planes that have superb traits. One of which is they proved after thousands of flights that sonic booms can be be reduced by a factor of 100--with the right designs.... they currently have a program underway to further develop the technology. That would mean in the future we can have supersonic flight as common place as anything. New York to LA in what? An hour? In 1974 they flew the SR71 from New York to London in under 2 hours. And here we are 45 years later....

Eventually they will be able to develop supersonic weapons including firearms that have little sound signature (relative to now) and virtually none on radar... and all that comes with technology.

3D technology is going to be the next driving factor, among several, in the next generation of weaponry.

The average joe bob if he wants to make his own gun, buy an 80% lower and go for it. For the ones who really get into the 3D stuff and start applying NASA and beyond technology into all forms of weaponry it's definitely going to be a big deal.

TROM is just one company among many that is ahead of the curve... they make a standard 300 BLK round that can be fired out of any of our guns... but it's effective range is 900 meters. No kidding. 900 meters out of a 300 BLK.

For those clowns to be worried about some criminal making a 'black rifle' in his basement is simply stupid. To have tens of thousands of dollars of gear and equipment is not something your average joe will be doing.

But 3D will have an impact all over the place. Look back in the 1980's. If you told someone you had a plastic gun they would look at you and go 'what?!'. Everyone wanted a Dirty Harry revolver. Nice and shiny.

Now look at how many polymer striker fired pistols there are.

The 3D thing isn't completely worked out yet, but you better believe that 20 years from now we will see all sorts of advancements from it.

[ThreeHundredBlackout]

I have thought a lot on the 3D thing and it's yet another evolution in the manufacture of firearms. There might be 10,000 people who really get into it, but out of those 10,000 we can get and gain some serious firearms innovations.

Ballistics is getting turned on it's head. The use of G1 and G7 are almost if not completely irrelevant when you get into the ELR world. The use of various materials for rounds or firearms is just the tip of the iceberg. They are experimenting with injection molded projectiles that have extreme ballistic and terminal traits.

20 years from now a soldier could carry twice the ammo, shoot effectively twice as far, and be able to take out tanks or other small vehicles with stuff he can run around the battle field with on his back. Now they can shoot terrorists off the backs of camels from 2 miles out. 20 years ago that was a fairy tale dream.

Carlos Hathcock was doing some ELR in the Vietnam Time frame with much less than we have today.

Currently they are working on X planes that have superb traits. One of which is they proved after thousands of flights that sonic booms can be be reduced by a factor of 100--with the right designs.... they currently have a program underway to further develop the technology. That would mean in the future we can have supersonic flight as common place as anything. New York to LA in what? An hour? In 1974 they flew the SR71 from New York to London in under 2 hours. And here we are 45 years later....

Eventually they will be able to develop supersonic weapons including firearms that have little sound signature (relative to now) and virtually none on radar... and all that comes with technology.

3D technology is going to be the next driving factor, among several, in the next generation of weaponry.

The average joe bob if he wants to make his own gun, buy an 80% lower and go for it. For the ones who really get into the 3D stuff and start applying NASA and beyond technology into all forms of weaponry it's definitely going to be a big deal.

TROM is just one company among many that is ahead of the curve... they make a standard 300 BLK round that can be fired out of any of our guns... but it's effective range is 900 meters. No kidding. 900 meters out of a 300 BLK.

For those clowns to be worried about some criminal making a 'black rifle' in his basement is simply stupid. To have tens of thousands of dollars of gear and equipment is not something your average joe will be doing.

But 3D will have an impact all over the place. Look back in the 1980's. If you told someone you had a plastic gun they would look at you and go 'what?!'. Everyone wanted a Dirty Harry revolver. Nice and shiny.

Now look at how many polymer striker fired pistols there are.

The 3D thing isn't completely worked out yet, but you better believe that 20 years from now we will see all sorts of advancements from it.

No doubt the tech innovation these days is pretty crazy..........especially the stuff we have around us that "doesnt exist yet "

I was just blown away at how blood hungry these politicians are for 3d plastic weaponry. (Even though there are already laws on the books about untraceable weapons.)

[alamo5000]

No doubt the tech innovation these days is pretty crazy..........especially the stuff we have around us that "doesnt exist yet "

I was just blown away at how blood hungry these politicians are for 3d plastic weaponry. (Even though there are already laws on the books about untraceable weapons.)

This entire case came about because of one reason, and one reason only. Other countries have very draconian gun laws and Obama felt that their law was superior to ours and more important to follow.

Those other countries bitched about the US allowing technology to undermine their gun laws be published---so Obama conceded and instructed his people to pursue this case as an ITAR or other similar type of case.

ITAR basically restricts what can/can't be exported in the form of weaponry or whatever.

Obama arbitrarily went against US law and several constitutional tenants because he's simply put a globalist and his disdain for firearms, the right, the 2A and other things all came in way less important to him.

One can only hope that things will be set right for good in the future.

[dellet]

5mb harddrive 1956.

This is a generational/ignorance/fear issue. Not knowing how a change in technology will change the game, or being able to connect clear rational thought. Or being able to connect it and be terrified of it. The first two posts are excellent examples.

3D printing will likely take the place of injection molding. For the price of one or two molds, you can by a top line printer. Not uncommon for intricate molds to be in the mid five digit numbers of dollars. The hold up now is print time. A complete 1911, which currently contains many MIM (metal injection mold) parts, has already been printed.

When the laws were written concerning firearms made by individuals, it took not only a fair amount of tooling, and money, it took a certain amount of talent to operate. The limiting factor was not money, it was knowledge. Now the limiting factor is basically money and since the cost of CNC machinery has dropped, money is no longer a factor. 80% parts can be sold for the cost of a tank of gas to any idiot with a drill motor and file. Any idiot can now afford to make their own gun. No talent, no money barrier. When any idiot can make a tool to threaten the power base, they lose control.

Trom, in marketing a 900 meter Blackout round is nothing more than that. A marketing ploy. It shows how really ignorant and guns and ammo informed, most gun owners are. If you can’t find a video on utoob, it can’t be true. Magazines used to inform readers, now they push products with their articles. Utoob is no different., hype who gives you free shit to test and drive the market.

Why is a 900 meter effective 300 Blackout round anything special?

Because most people who use the cartridge are ignorant sheep. They bought into the tactical tommie articles of CQB BS and subsonic use of the cartridge. Ignoring the super sonic capabilities. Anybody with the slightest understanding of ballistics, who chose to look, knew better. All you have to do is take your favorite 30 caliber long distance round, plug it into a ballistic app and move down the page to where the muzzle velocity of the Blackout is. That will be the yardage difference of the two rounds. Generally 3-400 yards when compared to a 308W.

The longest confirmed kill is over 1200 yards with a 308 and people use it at 1500 yards plus for target competition. Why is it a stretch of imagination than the same bullet at 60-75% of the speed would not perform just as well at 60-75% of the distance?

The real danger in a 3D printer and more computers is not people being able to download the program to print their own weapons. The real danger is people forgetting how to think, because the machine does it for you.

This is the real danger of our current education system, and why the country is in turmoil. People are starting to realize how manipulated they have become. If you think it only happens on the left, really read the posts on this forum and other firearm related forums and see how much time is devoted to dispelling myths put forth in articles about the latest and greatest cartridge or firearm. Gun owners are some of the most willing sheep I have ever met.

Rant off.

[rebel]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhmeeeeeeeeeeeen

Damn fine sermon. Preach it brother!

[alamo5000]

5mb harddrive 1956.

This is a generational/ignorance/fear issue. Not knowing how a change in technology will change the game, or being able to connect clear rational thought. Or being able to connect it and be terrified of it. The first two posts are excellent examples.

3D printing will likely take the place of injection molding. For the price of one or two molds, you can by a top line printer. Not uncommon for intricate molds to be in the mid five digit numbers of dollars. The hold up now is print time. A complete 1911, which currently contains many MIM (metal injection mold) parts, has already been printed.

When the laws were written concerning firearms made by individuals, it took not only a fair amount of tooling, and money, it took a certain amount of talent to operate. The limiting factor was not money, it was knowledge. Now the limiting factor is basically money and since the cost of CNC machinery has dropped, money is no longer a factor. 80% parts can be sold for the cost of a tank of gas to any idiot with a drill motor and file. Any idiot can now afford to make their own gun. No talent, no money barrier. When any idiot can make a tool to threaten the power base, they lose control.

Not to mention that with 3D it can greatly reduce the cost of development and many many other factors. They will be able to try new materials on new things and do a whole lot more trial and error (and fixing the errors) using computer technology and other things.

But to the left 'guns=bad'... they are ignoring the bigger picture than any clown with a hacksaw, a piece of PVC pipe, some duct tape and a scrap of lumber can make a 'bump stock'.

A long time ago I used to be a competition water skier and I remember the technology advances there. They went from one material to another to another... and with each generation they got better, but those generations all had drawbacks too. For example one mold for compression molding (at the time) would cost tens of thousands of dollars if not more than that plus a ton of other equipment. You had to have 100K in it to make something, so basically if you were going to run something you better make sure your design is good before jumping in.

You would have to do a run of 100,000 to recoup your costs before you could effectively do design changes. With stuff like 3D and with the advanced CNC and other machinery you could make products in samples of 10 not 10,000 to try something out. It allows much more rapid advancement of technology in general.

Trom, in marketing a 900 meter Blackout round is nothing more than that. A marketing ploy. It shows how really ignorant and guns and ammo informed, most gun owners are. If you can’t find a video on utoob, it can’t be true. Magazines used to inform readers, now they push products with their articles. Utoob is no different., hype who gives you free shit to test and drive the market.

Why is a 900 meter effective 300 Blackout round anything special?

Because most people who use the cartridge are ignorant sheep. They bought into the tactical tommie articles of CQB BS and subsonic use of the cartridge. Ignoring the super sonic capabilities. Anybody with the slightest understanding of ballistics, who chose to look, knew better. All you have to do is take your favorite 30 caliber long distance round, plug it into a ballistic app and move down the page to where the muzzle velocity of the Blackout is. That will be the yardage difference of the two rounds. Generally 3-400 yards when compared to a 308W.

The longest confirmed kill is over 1200 yards with a 308 and people use it at 1500 yards plus for target competition. Why is it a stretch of imagination than the same bullet at 60-75% of the speed would not perform just as well at 60-75% of the distance?

There is a lot of truth to that statement. I heard about TROM actually on YouTube on a channel about bullet designs of the future and so on and so forth. They talked about a lot of stuff, not just the 900 meter thing, but advanced polymers and other stuff like that.

The point I was making wasn't to toot the horn of a particular company but rather point out that something seemingly as 'simple' (not so simple) as bullet design is making huge leaps and bounds. If you take a 'standard' bullet from the 1980s in a factory loading from most manufacturers and try to make it fly to 900 meters accurately vs now with the multitude of high BC bullets it will be a night and day difference in how one achieves said goal. In other words TROM was more of a cherry picked example of companies trying to push the envelope in way of bullet designs.

On that front I would like to 'add to' or clarify a point I made above about G1 and G7... they are by FAR not 'irrelevant. Both are widely used. Both are extremely useful and the foundation for pretty much everything. But what I meant to allude to is now a days with shooters being able to drill 3500 yard shots on target with a cold bore shot with a rifle... that's just amazing.

Most of the ballistics software out there probably doesn't even go past 2000 yards at best. Now they are coming up with and advancing technology that will compute things on a much more advanced level considering those extreme ranges. 4000 yard shots or whatnot is insanity if you look at historical context. But now, not so much.

Those new ballistics programs are becoming so advanced now that it's not as simple as a drop table. They come up with down range ballistics, changing BC's based on bullet drop off and angle of fall, earth rotation, and all kinds of insane stuff... and you can put that thing on your phone and calculate out in the field for crying out loud.

In other words I didn't mean to imply that G1 or G7 were no longer relevant...not at all. That was totally my bad for not proof reading a late night comment. LOL!

All in all I think there are a lot of gun owners who just 'shoot' and don't think. Others are out there trying to make a difference, learn things, apply science, and whatever.

As you so definitely point out, there are still the myth people out there who are in the 'my daddy served in Vietnam and used an M16 so I know all about those fancy AR's' type of people. It's eye rolling how stupid some people can be. They might have been right, back in say 1960. But today not so much.

I had a big discussion about barrels with people and it was the same thing. The myths involved there are astounding in and of itself and that's just one component. I could go on for days about how different barrels meet different requirements for different applications and I don't even come close to considering myself an expert in the field.

Yeah those machine gun barrels might be great---in machine guns--- but they are not worth a crap if you are doing bench rest. Just the sheer metallurgy involved makes a difference.

I bought a stainless barrel for one of AR's and boy did I ever hear about that. "It's only going to be good for 1,500 rounds man" or whatever nonsense they came up with. I called the manufacturer and given my application my barrel (for 5.56) is good for sub MOA for 12,000 to 15,000 rounds of shooting depending on use schedule.

If I was shooting select fire (which I can't afford) it would be different... but for an average range session, it's unlikely that I will have to rebarrel my AR for quite some time given my application and seeing how I am not really into mag dumps.

[alamo5000]

Long story short the story of 3D printing is just getting started, but that still doesn't stop these clowns on the anti-2A front from making all kinds of outlandish and wrong fearmongering statements about it.

An average garage builder can build a a gun right now...they can also go down and find their seedy brother in law's friend to just buy one that works for them and go on about their business.

It's downright dumb, right up there with the 'full semi automatic' or the '10,000 rounds per second'...ninja silence assassin machine death mongering fearmongering crowd that has no clue about what they are doing or talking about trying to be the ones to make the rules.

Don't even get me started on gun laws. The NFA was largely written in the 1930's. With today's tech somebody please tell me why a 14.5 inch barrel is more 'dangerous' than the arbitrary selected 16 inch number?

They go through all this nonsensical BS that in 95% or more of the cases is rendered irrelevant to any factual based stuff, except that it simply has been on the books for a while. They built the system to catch bootleggers and rum runners. We all know that's a big problem now. It is largely void of any factual modern reasoning about the actual use and technology of most modern firearms.

[dellet]

The best thing about modern technology is it helps explain what the old guys just did.

Harry Pope is worth studying if you are interested in the history of precision shooting. He often shot shot basically sub MOA groups off hand at 200 yards. A bullseye is 1 1/2” on a Schuetzen target. Cast bullets, 50-100 shots in a match.

A quote from Harry “ Stand on your own two feet and shoot like a man”

Harry M. Pope

"He Makes the finest Rifle Barrels in the World"

By Edwin Teale

November 1934

If you want to visit the place where the world's finest rifle barrels are made, you have to climb four flights of fire-escape stairs zigzagging up the face of a red brick warehouse in Jersey City, N. J. At the top, you knock at a begrimed door bearing the faint letters: H. M. POPE.
Behind that door, for more than a quarter of a century, Harry Pope has been turning out precision barrels that have made him famous. A dozen times they have won hi the Olympic Games. Again and again they have smashed world's records. When Gustave Schweizer, not long ago, ran up the phenomenal record of eighty-seven bulls-eyes at 1000 yards in a Peekskill, N. Y., match, it was a Pope barrel that directed the bullets at the distant target. When the five-man American team captured the international rifle match at Milan, Italy, a few yean ago, defeating crack shots from Europe and South America, it relied upon Pope barrels to carry it to victory.

Harry Pope never advertises. Yet, orders come from all over the United States, from most of the countries of Europe, and from as far away as Australia, India, and China. Wherever lovers of fine guns meet, the name Pope is familiar.

Several minutes pass after you knock. Then you hear the shuffling of feet, the lock clicks, and the door opens. A stooped little man with a long white beard, a black mechanic's cap perched on the back of his head, and two pairs of spectacles—a gold-rimmed over a silver-rimmed pair—resting on his nose, peers out and invites you in. He is Harry Pope, an old-time craftsman in an age of mass production.

Inside the shop, you follow him down a narrow lane between dust-covered boxes, trunks, papers, yellowed magazines, toolkits, sheaves of rifle barrels, hogsheads of dusty gun stocks. A worn black leather couch is half buried under odds and ends. A small table, piled high with papers, looks like a haycock, white at the top and yellow toward the bottom. Pinned to it is a printed sign: "Don't lean against this table. If these papers are spilled, there will be Hell to pay."

The only flat object in the room that is not loaded down is a single board. Pope keeps it standing upright in a corner. Over two boxes, it forms an emergency table where he can lay his tools when working.



"You might think this is confusion," he says as you reach his workbench, almost hidden under odds and ends, "but what looks like order to other people looks like contusion to me. This room is like a filing cabinet. I can put my hands on anything in it, even if I haven't seen it for ten years. But if anybody moves something as much as three inches, it's as good as lost."

In the twenty-seven years he has been in the same building, he has washed his windows twice. He believes the accumulation of grime diffuses the light and enables him to see better. One of his windows he never will wash. It is covered with penciled notes. Half a dozen years ago, data he bad placed on a scrap of paper blew out the window. Afterwards, he made it a rule to jot down important notes on the walls or window where they can't blow away.

Over his workbench hangs a sign, various words underlined in red. It reads:

"No delivery promised. Take your work when well done or lake it elsewhere. When? If you must know when I will be through with your work, the answer is now. Take your work away. I don't want it. I have no way of knowing when. I work seventeen hours a day. Daily interruptions average IVi hours. Dark weather sets me back still more. I'm human. I'm tired. I refuse longer to be worried by promises that circumstances do not allow me to keep."

The lower edge of the sign is smudged with greasy fingerprints, records of the many times he has jerked the pasteboard from the wall to hold before non-observant customers who persisted in knowing when. In fact, most of the guns that come in are now accepted with the express understanding that they will be fitted with new barrels when and if Pope ever gets time to do it. More orders are turned down than are accepted, yet between 200 and 300 guns are piled up ahead of him. At seventy-three, he is working seventeen hours a day and answering correspondence after ten o'clock at night. He makes barrels for pistols and revolvers when he has to. But what he wants to do is make rifle barrels.

After hours, when the warehouse is closed, customers who know the procedure stand on the street corner below and yell: "Pope! Hey, Pope!" until he paddles down and lets them in. Everybody in the neighborhood knows him and when you set up the shout they all join in until he pokes his head out the window four stories above. He never has had a telephone and he frequently brings a supply of food and sleeps in his shop until his grub gives out.

Not long ago, a man brought him a gun he wanted fixed. He found Pope bent over a vise filing on a piece of steel. When he started to explain what he wanted, he was told: "Don't talk to me now!" A little later, he broached the subject of his visit a second time. Pope shouted: "I said don't talk to me now!" By the time Pope laid down his file, the customer was packing up his things and muttering something about "a swell way to treat a customer."

It was an obvious statement. But, what the man did not know was that Pope had been working for two solid weeks making a special too! to rifle the barrel of an odd-caliber gun. He had filed it down to two ten-thousandths of an inch of its exact diameter and the light was just right for finishing it. If an interruption had made him file a hair's breadth beyond the mark, his whole two weeks' labor would have been lost.

All his rifling is done by hand. He judges what is going on inside the barrel by the feel and the sound of the cutting took. To rifle out the inside of a .22-caliber barrel takes about seven hours. The cutter is fitted with a wedge and screwhead so the feed, or depth it cuts, can be varied from time to time. The steel shaving removed from the grooves at first is about l/5000th of an inch thick. Later, when the end of the work is near and there is danger of cutting too far, less than 1/40,000 of an inch is removed during a "pass." It takes about 120 passes to cut each of the eight grooves within the barrel. All his rifle barrels are drilled from solid stock, special oil-tempered fine-grain steel being employed. For fifteen years, he has been getting his steel from the same company after trying almost every kind on the market. Some batches of steel cut more easily than others and he has to "humor the stock." The worst steel he ever got came during the last days of the World War. It was so full of grit and cinders he had to sharpen a reamer fourteen times to get through one barrel. Ordinarily he can get through twelve on a single sharpening.

When he nears the end of a job, he pushes a bullet through the barrel and with a micrometer measures the exact depth of the grooves recorded on the lead. Sometimes it is two weeks before he is satisfied with a barrel he has produced. To him, they are almost like children and he will never do another job for a customer who abuses one through ignorance or neglect. On the other hand, he has made as many as nine barrels for a single individual who appreciated fine guns.

The high-pressure, smokeless ammunition and jacketed bullets used today are especially hard on the inside of barrels. Three or four thousand rounds is all they can stand. Owners of Pope barrels usually save them for important contests and practice with other rifles. In contrast, Pope has a .33-caliber black-powder rifle that has been fired 125,000 tunes and is still in almost as good condition as it was in 1892, when it was first made.

All told, Pope has turned out more than 8,000 hand-tooled barrels, fitting them on almost every make of gun produced in America and on many of those manufactured abroad. Most of the demand now is for .22- and .30-caliber barrels with only an occasional .32 or .38.

Thirty years ago, Pope records for off-hand shooting were almost as famous as Pope barrels. Once over a period of several days, he made 696 consecutive bulls-eyes at 200 yards and another time he placed fifty consecutive shots all within three and three fourths inches of dead center. His fifty-shot record, made shortly after the turn of the century, was 467. Today it is only 470. His hundred-shot record was 917. Today, the record is only 922.

But for a fluke during a match at Springfield, Mass., on March 2, 1903, Pope would still hold the world's record for 200 yards on the standard American target. He was putting bullet after bullet into the bulls-eye, when a spectator disturbed him by asking questions. He forgot to remove the false muzzle, a one-inch auxiliary barrel placed on the end of the gun to protect the real barrel when the bullet was rammed home, and did not see it when aiming through the telescope sight. The shot blew the false muzzle off and counted as a miss. In spite of this break in luck, he ran up a score of 467 for the fifty shots, was high man for the day, and advanced the existing record four points! Some time later, after his gun had cooled off and conditions had changed, he tried an extra shot just to see what his score might have been without the miss. He scored an eight. If that could have been added to his mark for the day, the total would have been 475, five points beyond the world's record in 1934!

As he tells you of these old-time matches, he fishes yellowed score cards from the inner pockets of an ancient wallet or digs into a pile of odds and ends like a squirrel finding a nut buried in a forest and brings forth a crumbling target riddled by his fire decades ago.

From time to time, as he 'illcs, he lights a cigarette with a cigar lighter. But it is no ordinary lighter. It is e glass syrup jug a foot high filled with soaked cotton batting and having a flint wheel soldered to its top. One filling win last a year.

As long as he can remember, Pope has been interested in guns. He was born in 1861 at Walpole, N. H. By the time he was ten years old, he was running errands for a firm in Boston. Every noon he would duck up alleys from one sporting-goods store to another to gaze at the firearms in the windows. When he was twelve, he had one of the largest collections of free catalogs in the world. He wrote to European as well as American manufacturers for pamphlets and price lists.

In 1881 he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an engineering degree. For twenty-three years afterwards he was in the bicycle business, ending as superintendent of a plant at Hartford, Conn.

While he was turning out bicycles, he worked with guns on the side. At least twice a week, he used to get up at three o'clock in the morning, climb on his high-wheel bicycle, and pedal out to a target range, his muzzle-loader over one shoulder and a fish basket filled with ammunition and targets slung over the other. After shooting for two hours, he would pedal back uphill to town and be ready for work at seven.

When he traded in his .40-caliber Remington for a new .42-40 which had appeared on the market, he found himself confronted with a mystery which led him into making barrels of his own. His shooting dropped off as soon as he began to use the new gun. He blamed himself at first. Then he began making tests of various loads, bullets, and powders. He built a machine rest for the gun to take the human element out of the experiments. In the end, he discovered that the trouble lay in the pitch of the rifling. The twist was so slow it didn't spin the lead fast enough to keep the bullet traveling head-on. The slug was actually turning somersaults.

Working nights on an old foot lathe in his basement, he turned out his first gun barrel in 1884, and fitted it to the defective gun. His shooting scores not only equaled his old marks with the Remington but exceeded them. Some of his friends at the local gun club wanted barrels on their guns. Immediately, their scores jumped. The records made by the club attracted attention all over the country and letters of inquiry began coming in. In 1895, Pope took a few outside orders. In two weeks, he had enough to keep him busy nights for six months.

A few years later he headed for California. San Francisco was then the center of shooting interest in the United States. He set the opening day of his gun shop for the eighteenth of April. 1906. At five o'clock in the morning, the great earthquake and fire struck the city and wiped out his shop and everything it contained. Returning east, he settled down at 18 Morris Street, Jersey City, in the building he still occupies.

Only once in his half-century of handling guns has he had an accident. A friend asked him to fit a rifle barrel to one side of a double-barreled shotgun so he could hunt deer with the rifle side and ducks and small game with the shotgun side. Pope finished it just in time to catch a train for a week-end visit and hunting trip without being able to give it shop tests.

The next day, he took the curious combination gun out for a trial. On the first shot, the rifle side drove the firing pin bade out of the gun almost with the speed of a bullet. Only the fact that it struck the stock a glancing blow and a cross grain deflected its course kept it from striking Pope squarely in the right eye. As it was, the spinning piece of steel, an inch long and a quarter of an inch thick, hit flat just above his left eyebrow, burying itself in the bone. After a surgeon extracted it. Pope went on with his hunting trip and bagged the first buck shot by the party.

It is just fifty years this spring since Pope made his first gun barrel. After half a century of machine-age progress in which most manufacturing has been turned over to automatic mechanisms. Pope remains a New England mechanic. Still using home-made tools, still employing time-worn methods, he is producing still, in his high-perched little workshop, gunbarrels that lead the world.

[alamo5000]

Extremely interesting post dellet!

I liked that!