Some good reading for modern machining and gunsmithing.

[Felenari]

I'm going to school for gunsmithing in trinidad soon but I feel like I'm going to miss some key things in lectures. I'm European (Belgium) and used to get confused sometimes when people asked me for certain tools. I've gotten a lot better tinkering on cars with my wife's cousin but know next to nothing about machining in English. I've caught a few terms here and there on YouTube but not too much. I've got two books on gunsmithing that are supposed to be staples. I've misplaced them getting ready for the move so I can't give you the title. :-P Something about making sure something comes with makes it dissappear half the time.

Long question short. Is there something every machinist should read? Bridgeport for dummies perhaps? I did some lathing and milling in school 20 years ago and can't remember 99% of it and the class was in Flemish.

If anyone knows a good book on designing your own firearms, that would be neat as well. Little bit of gunsmithing with some physics and material sciences as well. :-P

[T. O'Heir]

"...terms here and there on YouTube..." Those may or may not be correct anyway. YouTube is not the place to learn anything. Anybody with internet access can post anything they want there with nobody ensuring what is said has anything to do with reality.
I wouldn't worry too much about the whole thing. They'll start from the beginning and assume nobody in the class knows anything anyway. Brushing up on your math(Trig and geometry) might help. Getting a Flemish/English dictionary might help too.
And remember that every gunsmith is a machinist, but not every machinist is a gun smith. Very little machining is done by smithies.
"...something every machinist should read..." Nope. If you can, buy a copy of Machinery's Handbook. Over $100 last time I looked, but there's several on Amazon.com for less. It has math formula's, conversion charts, etc., etc. It has recipes for colouring metal too.

[F. Guffey]

If you can, buy a copy of Machinery's Handbook. Over $100 last time I looked, but there's several on Amazon.com for less. It has math formula's, conversion charts, etc., etc. It has recipes for colouring metal too.

The one I use is the Seventeenth Edition with a copywrite of 1964 with a total number of copies of 1,435,000 from 1914 to 1964.

And gage is spelled 'gage' in this fine book. I also have Starrett machinist handbooks that go back to about 1908, for some reason they decided to spell gage the same way, Starrett spells gage 'gage'.

The only term I have with the same meaning and a different name is "spot on' and 'last word', I have a 'spot on' indicator.

F. Guffey

[Oliver Sudden]

“How to run a lathe” by South Bend has a most of what you ask for. I bought mine when I started gunsmith school and still keep it handy 40 years later.

[HiBC]

You can learn a great deal from books....but I don't think you learn to play a piano without a piano..
Do you have a mill to work with?
I have not attended Trinidad's school,but I know of it. I think part of your curriculumwill be a project manual,from it you will make gunsmithing tools.

Each of the tools has its own lessons and experience.

A danger in trying to learn on your own...your instructors will have a plan.It won't help to learn habits you will have to break. I suggest you let your instructors teach you machining basics.Your skills and confidence will grow as you master those.

Machining is mostly applying a mathmatical definition of a part to a piece of stock. Shop math skills are very useful. Plane Geometry,trig,etc. Be able to see and understand trig functions.Example,you drive the centerline of a cutter with the machine,but the radius of the cutter cuts. How are you at calculating the points of tangency from the cutter to the workpiece?
You are in a metric part of the world. Trinidad probably is not.Master fractions of an inch.Know without looking that 5/16 in is .3125.. Most machine tools(USA) are set up for .100 or .200 in travel per dial revolution.Running a Bridgeport,you get used to 5 cranks per inch.

So,be agile at dealing with fractional drills,reamers,end mills and stock sizes,yet feeding the machine decimal equivalents.Of course,you will still work with metric parts.Be good at converting metric drawings to inches.

How are your Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing skills? Can you interpet an engineering drawing?

I would guess Grizzly Tools would have some reference books.

There are the classic European apprentice skills...go to a vise with a lump of steel and a file...and make an accurate,square,1.000 in cube.

https://youtu.be/QJXqHpSh3SE

https://youtu.be/h4KaiG7CpSQ

https://youtu.be/C3Glnnby0d0

[4V50 Gary]

I'm of the opinion that learning how to use a machine should be kinesthetic. You simply have to do it.

You might want to sign up for NRA Summer School at TSJC to get a jumpstart on machine shop.

BTW, when you take welding, make yourself a slave (a stand to hold the rifle when it is placed on a vise). I wish someone told me to do that. I might take welding again just to make a slave and a stand to hold my engraving ball.

I see you are in San Franciscograd. What neighborhood?

[Felenari]

I had a big post but it got deleted. Just my luck this month. I meant to reply to all of this earlier but it's been beyond insane in my life lately. Epic streak of bad luck.


Anyways. I'm going to make some laminates with measurements etc on them for my toolbox. I'll check out most of the recommended books and I agree, you can't learn to play piano without a piano. I'm looking at some shoptime over at the Crucible (local fire school) but time is a factor. My wife's health isn't great atm and the renovation of the house is eating all my time right now. Realistically my schooling has been delayed by 6 months at minimum.

I'm practising my math right now with books and websites for the Accuplacer test. I want to try and test out if a bunch of English and math.

[4V50 Gary]

Suggest you take machine shop classes at Skyline college. Might as well knock out your english, math and any other non-gunsmithing classes you need for an A. A. S. from TSJC at CCSF (50 Phelan) since CCSF is free for locals.

Here's what's needed for an A. S. degree in gonnesmithing:
http://www.trinidadstate.edu/smartpa...ithing_aas.pdf

[Felenari]

I have the whole list already. Even visited the school a while ago in a road trip to check out the feel of the place before moving my entire life over there. I'm working on my tool list right now to find some, not necessarily cheap, but cheaper than school library tools. I'm buying the micrometers new. My dad has a hookup at his university in Belgium for some German ones.

I've looked into the skyline classes but my timing has always been off between work, injuries and working on my house. I get about two hours after dinner, every day, to sit and relax before bed. That's why I'm looking for some books.

[Unclenick]

Thirty years ago, when engineering work was slow, a partner and I did machine tool repair work for several local plants. During that time, I got a reprint of a book written in the 1950's called Machine Tool Reconditioning, by Edward F. Connelly. It covers scraping and figuring setups and establishing a datum from which to true ways and right surfaces and generally helps you wrap your mind around how machine tools work. The scraping, though largely replaced by precision grinding in mass-produced machine tools today, is still used to figure super-precise aerospace machine tools and is an excellent way to make surfaces flat and make sliding surfaces fit and is therefore worth knowing, IMHO. I doubt you could find a printed copy easily now, but the book is currently available to read for free online, here.

[Felenari]

That sounds like a cool book. I remember my dad scraping his hss triangles on sharpening stones and flat marble bricks with polishing powder as a kid. I wanna say he did it for machining delrin so it would be a polished piece when he was done machining. I'm going to check out that book. Thank you.

[HiBC]

A little off topic,I like the 12 in pieces of Starrett or equivalent feeler guage stock to make scrapers good for gun stock work,or scraping brass or plastic to shape. I use .025 to .031 in thickness a few inches long and grind across the end to leave the cutting burr. Grind any shape you need.
The flexibility is just right to drag on your workpiece.

On topic:

I recall Clyde Baker and Roy Dunlap (or Dunlop?) wrote really good books on gunsmithing,Baker's was from the 1930's,and he wrote as a teacher and a mentor.

As I recall,the textbooks for trade school type classes may have been "Machine Shop Practice" There is more than one volume.

Frank DeHaas books on single shot rifles are a wealth of information.He has one on building a single shot.

There is a periodical I've never bought..I thinkit is "The Practical Machinist" that is for hobby machinists including gunsmiths.

A challenge with many gunsmithing jobs is "How the heck do I hold and set up this part?"

Few gun parts are simple to just clamp in a vise.

I've machined (manually) a few Winchester Winder Musket lower tangs,a couple of Franchi double shotgun safety linkages,ets,where the trick is to machine the part as if it is suspended within the rectangular block of steel blank you are working with.You leave strategic tabs of stock to hold the part stable,and cut the part free when you are done.

Many old parts were made on a shaper.You won't find many shapers in shops today. There was a strategy to making a part on a shaper.
Think making a long stick ,like an extrusion,of a profile of the part,then slicing parts off of it.

Example? For Rolling Block extractors I took a bar of round 8620,and an original extractor. First feature I bored was the ID hole.

Then I pressed a brass plug in one end ,with a boss to fit the original extractor ID,and a female 8-32 thread for a screw to hold the original on the end of the bar.I used the original for a template.

I chucked that bar in a Yuasa Accu-Dex ,sort of a rotary table with a lathe chuck on it. I set that up with the bar of stock horizontal and aligned with the
Bridgeport "Y" axis.

Then I used the Bridgeport like a shaper.I used a 10X loupe and my eyeball to bring the cutting corner of my end mill within .001 or .002 of the original extractor,and cut lengthwise down the bar. I rotated the bar a bit,and eyballed another cut. Soon I had a bar with the outer profile of the exractor around the hole in the middle.
All that remained was slicing off extractors.
Another cute trick,we did that standing the bar vertical,and using a 5/32 thick slotting saw on an R-8 mandrel. We used the saw kerf and offset to slice the parts to finish thickness,but used the kerf to allow stock for the extractor hook. You don't slice all the way through,then you make a "Z"offset .You leave a step for the hook.Its easy to see while you are doing it.

So,why did I tell you this?

There IS some skill to using an end mill to cut chips. Agreed.

There is a whole 'nuther skill set to being able to see the part inside the stock,and make a strategy to position ,hold,and manipulate that stock while you cut away the chips that are not the desired part.

Its sort of like a 3 dimensional version of painting a floor so you end up finishing at the doorway.

You can exersize your mind looking at gun parts and thinking through "How would I make one?"

[Felenari]

Good post thank you. I carve wands and other wooden things in my free time. I design them more or less in the same manner. Can I see the piece inside the chunk of wood? Do I have the size radius cutter thingy I need for this or do I have to do it in several steps? I've always imagined machining is the same way, like you said, painting towards the door. It took me a long time to learn how to plan my carving better. I used to just take hunk o wood and start cutting. My success rate was terrible. Now it's much better with a bit of planning before I slice and dice.

[SGW Gunsmith]

When I was barely out of high school, 19, I got involved with a manufacturing company as a 'new hire'. My attendance was exemplary and my willingness to learn anything that was foisted upon me, was undertaken with relish. Because of that attitude, I was asked to get involved with four other candidates, in an apprenticeship program to become a tool maker. I jumped at that chance. Mind you, this was in 1966 and the draft was in full force. I was accepted to a full fledged apprenticeship program that would involve a 4-year apprenticeship program whereby I would spend most of the day in school and an 8-hour shift from 2:30 until 11:00 PM learning what machines did what and how they needed to be handled.
After I made it through those informative four years, the Tool Room foreman asked me who I'd like to train with. Well, we had 16 journeyman toolmakers who came from Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Lithuania and Germany who fled that part of the world due to the current take-over by Hitler. These guys were all knowledgeable machinists and I wanted to learn as best I could, all that they were willing to pass along to a kid with an open mind. When Bill Badley, the tool room foreman asked me who I'd like to train with, my response was, "All of these guys, they all have something I can learn from".
So, if anyone has any thoughts about learning a worthwhile trade, take it from me, learn from those who have done it for a very long time.

[mete]

Felenari, that's what the paper and pencil are for !

[Felenari]

I've been pestering my dad for a bit with questions about milling (he teaches in Belgium) and I think he's getting slightly annoyed. Something about being retired and no free classes or something. He was grumbling pretty badly. :-P

In all seriousness though, SWG Gunsmith, my response would've been the same. I'm still trying to get a foothold on all the different forging techniques out there and I've been doing it for 10+ years at this point. I don't think I'll ever be able to call myself a master anything because there is always so much to learn. I'm bringing materials to Colorado to trade with students and teachers for time on the machines or knowledge. Bringing about 200lbs of billet aluminium and 6v titanium armor plate blocks to trade.

I'm honestly beyond excited to get my house finished so I can throw myself into this. Not being able to craft anything these past few months has been killing me.

[mete]

I went to CST myself ! Remember that in a trade school the harder you work the more you learn. In gunsmithing learning never stops

[4V50 Gary]

What mete says is correct. In our Fyrearm Repair Class II, the more projects you worked on, the more experience and skills you could develop. A fellow in the semester ahead of me did headspace checks (50 points). That's all he did to earn his repair points. He did himself a disservice as he didn't learn anything new. The instructor thereafter limited us to 50 points for headspace check for that class.

750 points were needed for an "A" and there were about three of us (including yours truly) that earned over 1,000 points. One of the other 1,000 pointer told me to stop and leave some unworked on guns for other students. That was quite wise of a 20 year old.

You're always faced with new issues and have to figure out what to do about it. Those Brownell Gunsmithing Kink books are good.

Suggest you actually get some real shop time on a mill and a lathe. The more the better. After the first semester, I always took some sort of machine shop class just to get access to the machines and to make tools. I always regret not making a slave to hold the stock up or for an engraving vise.

Summer school schedule for TSJC is out. Got it last week.