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From my time working as a drafter/designer at a vending machine manufacturer, I know from sheet metal.
I'm presently enjoying someone explaining to me how difficult an AR-18 is to make and therefore the TRW Low Maintenance Rifle will also be difficult to make.
Actually...
The AR-18 is "difficult" to make because it's a fairly complicated design. Much simpler than the Stoner 63, but still fairly complicated.
Even so, once you've got your dies, fixtures and jigs; not a difficult thing to manufacture. Design and set-up is expensive and difficult, manufacturing is fairly cheap and easy if you can commit to volume and the machinery that allows it. Small runs can't so they're much more expensive and labor intensive.
The TRW LMR isn't complex like that. It's MUCH simpler.
Possibly it can be made from tube-stock.
But it's been fun letting this "expert" lecture me on stuff he's clearly never done.
Related to that is the series of posts on Gun Lab about developing the press tools for a of VG1-5 reproductions. This was a last ditch weapon designed to be simple and cheap. After what Chuck went through I appreciate the skills of the GM Guide Lamp engineers who made the M3 "grease gun"
ReplyDeleteSome of the easist to make repeating firearms are fully auto. Making them run selectively is more difficult. You can make, I am told, a fair replica of the M3 grease gun from hardware store parts bins and simple sheet metal tools.
ReplyDeleteSTEN. The Brits made 10s if not 100s of thousands of them in makeshift machine shops during WWII. The hardest part of making one is rifling the inside of the barrel. The body of it is basically exhaust pipe of the right diameter. The rest of the parts are simple stampings from sheet metal or can be made with a pretty basic metal lathe and a non-automated mill or fabricated from rod stock, etc. There are detailed blueprints that someone with little more than high school metal shop experience could follow and using tools you can buy online or even at Harbor Freight.
DeleteYou'd have to jerry rig tooling to cut the rifling but there are various methods covered online in Youtube videos, etc.
The M3 grease gun is only a little more complicated than the STEN. Some of the Russian SMG designs also wouldn't be that tough for anyone with a half decent shop to build.
-swj
FWIW, the reason to go with the STEN is not only is it probably one od the easiest small arms to manufacture, it uses 9x19mm Parabellum ammo. Cheap, ubiquitous and relatively controllable in a sub gun like this, at least compared to .45 ACP. Lighter for 30-ish magazine capacity too. The Russian designs are mainly for 7.62x25 Tokarev. That's not a bad round, but since supplies of cheap milsurp ammo for it have largely dried up, it's not as practical a choice as 9mm. Magazines that will fit a STEN are also probably easier to find than any of the others. Its probabyl not impossible to modify other 9mm mags to fit a STEN or adapt the STEN design to take some other 9mm mag. There have even been STEN designs altered to use a more conventional bottom loading mag instead of the side loading ones which some people don't like.
Delete-swj